What Ops Problems Do You Have?

How to find crucial areas that need improvements and prioritize them?

Introduction

Over the years of coaching, consulting, and even as an internal hire there has been a singular common refrain more than any other.

“How do we know what to do? How do we know what to do first?”

• Recruitment

• Onboarding

• Our mess of a product lifecycle

• Capacity and utilization planning & tracking

• Reviews & career progression

I’m sure y’all can keep adding to this list of high priority items that many of you are thinking about on a daily basis. What makes this more complicated is that some on your team, or some design leader’s portfolio areas might need 1 thing and others might think they need something else. This makes planning even more difficult.

What to do?

As the adage goes, just because “the client” says they need a bridge, doesn’t mean that you should design a bridge. The first activity is always going to be to dig deeper to understand the problem. You need to understand the point of views of many people in the system and not just the point of view of the person who brought up the problem.

This is a design problem…

… so treat it like a design problem. You need to figure out how to frame the problem in a way that works for all stakeholders involved. You need to be inclusive of all stakeholders to be sure that you don’t miss anything. You need to design the research. You need to find a way to analyze it. You need to have a way to turn this analysis into an action plan that aligns to as many of the needs of all the stakeholders.

What you can’t do, if you want to be effective, is to propose a single way of working and expect everyone to just follow it.

Gathering data

• Be sure to gather data from all the different types of stakeholders and be sure to have multiple data points with as wide perspectives as possible.

• You are not looking for agreement between people at this time. You are actually looking for people’s individual truths.

• Contextualize your data. It is not just good enough to have post-its filled with quotes. You need to be sure you capture the metadata of the quote that is relevant.¹

  • Who?

  • Product area or workstream?

  • Functional area?

  • Role within that function?

Analysis

I love the classic affinity modeling exercise. I believe it’s the quickest way to analyze unstructured data. But in this case you might also have structured data, too. This means you have the ability to slice and dice your data across different axes. The other way you need to make sure you are looking at the data is from different angles. In this case the different angles are the people who both helped collect the data and the remaining stakeholders who will be impacted by what happens with the data. Including these perspectives is vital to long term success of such a strategic initiative.

Synthesis

If analysis is the ability to bring knowledge to data, then synthesis allows us to turn that knowledge into understanding and possibly apply it as insightful wisdom. The 1st part is adding another layer of structure and in this case outright interpretation to the analysis previously done. The 2nd step is to test and hopefully apply that interpretation into action.

What does that mean? In this case it means in step one you begin to craft insights and categorize them. Then by using a framework you begin to turn the insights into a narrative. Being a narrative allows for everything to be understandable and alignable across as wide an audience as possible. When it comes to frameworks there are many out there to choose from. But for the work we do, I recommend the following:

• Insight: is a short description of the insight in clearly written as a brief statement.

• Signals: are the collected or calculated data that explains both the impact and the insight itself. They answer the question as to how we came to this insight.

• Impact: is why this insight matters to some segment of stakeholders. You can have many impacts for a single insight. Try to write an impact with some sort of mix of quality and quantity.

• Initiatives: are the actives, both short term and long term², that the team now understands will reverse the impact described for this insight. Sometimes a single remedy might reverse the impact of many insights.

• Success criteria: tell all the stakeholders if we are seeing the changes we expected from the initiatives. These aren’t just metrics because there needs to be observational data along with more quantifiable data used for success factors.

  • Sometimes instrumenting platforms is an initiative in and of itself, so that we can collect the metrics we need to see trends along success factors.

You should be able to structure a slide deck where 1 or more insights onto a single Powerpoint slide.

Choose your path wisely

One of the biggest things that happens when people first get introduced to doing design research is that they confuse the symptom for the disease, and relief for the cure. There is a difference between taking a Claritin to stop sneezing and getting shots to suppress your immune response permanently. The same goes for this type of work, too. Now, this doesn’t mean you only look for cures and ignore relief, but it does mean you need to know the difference. You also need to measure if you have enough fingers to plug all the wholes in the damn (mixing the metaphors is fun). This is to say, I definitely need to make sure people are taken care of right away, but while I’m doing that I also need to work on initiatives that fix the issues permanently. This is one reason why there are short-term and long-term initiatives that come out of this process.

Prioritization is your best ally

Unless you prioritize you really aren’t creating a viable plan. Prioritization is difficult but it keeps you and your team sane, and on a steady course to success.

Priorities can change. They are not immutable at all. Doing the work itself is a learning exercise. Outside forces swoop in with their own agendas and needs. Sometimes these are arbitrary and sometimes these are rooted deeply in the business. This is to say, do the work of prioritizing, but don’t hold to them absolutely. Rigid things break more easily than flexible things.

When we are starting out, everyone will be pulling at us because they think their need is the most important need in the world. By getting buy-in you are setting expectations. But you also need to be real with yourself, too. We want to make everyone happy. We like to dig into all the problem puzzles. It just feels good.

The reality is that our teams are always under resourced and time is linear & finite despite what Einstein says. So, don’t go over board. You and the leadership team are going to have to make hard decisions—good decisions. Not everyone is going to be happy. But if you communicate plans, people will at least know they will be taken care of. And constant communication that updates people on progress helps them see that their turn is approaching, even if it is more slowly than they would like.

Conclusion

Discovery & planning is your best friend. They will help your team and yourself set expectations, and give guidance.

1. If you are doing this physically, you can use index cards instead of post-its so you can have the quote on one side and the metadata on the other side (like a baseball card; if that reference helps). If you are doing this virtually, Miro has a component type called a card that is the equivalent of an index card with a bit more power, as it can give the data computational structure that a physical card can’t give.

2. Short term is within a single quarter while long term is longer, but less than a year if possible.