About me (the main stuff)
Reader.
Walker.
Writer.
Theatre performer.
Singer in progress.
About me (work edition)
NOTE: I’m at capacity right now and for the foreseeable future. If you want a half-day once-off thing or you think you might be able to tempt me into making a massive trade-off, by all means.
I’m an operations consultant.
I know that might seem a bit vague, so let me elaborate…
What do I mean by operations?
My favourite definition was put forward by Sebastian Marshall:
If an organisation has a philosophy that is made manifest through strategy, and tactics carry out that strategy, operations is the coordination of tactics over time.
Tactics are actions that people take as well as processes (repeated actions)…but also actions and processes completed by software.
I see operations as the layer between strategy and tactics: how the strategy gets turned into actions and processes, how the actions are monitored to completion, how (and whether or not) actions are converted to processes, and how processes are improved over time.
Smaller organisations often find themselves in a transition from ad hoc processes as needed (and often driven by emergency) to stable and reliable processes, let alone documented and scalable.
Individuals too, wrestle with the problems of operations. You might have a strategy, a high-level plan over the longer term. Turning that plan into day-to-day actions and processes, and establishing a way of tracking that is a skill that almost no one is born with and is not widely taught.
What do I do?
I solve operations problems.
Here are some examples of operations problems:
- I’ve got a great idea of what needs to be done but I can’t seem to describe it well enough to communicate it to someone else
- I’ve got a well-defined strategy but I can’t hand it off to my team like that and/or I don’t want to be the one who has to say who does what and when
- We’re really really busy but it’s hard to know if all of that effort is actually moving the needle
- I know we’re wasting time and energy because we don’t have the right tools for the job, but figuring out which tools and moving everything over isn’t in anyone’s job description
- Three different people do the same task and it comes out differently every time - no matter what we do, we just can’t get it consistent
- We want to automate ALL THE THINGS
- The biggest problem is me, but I can’t figure out how to make the most of my time (and it’s not up to my team!)
- I just know there’s a better way of doing this but I haven’t figured it out