This week, as I was sitting down to write my blog post for operations, I came to face what I thought was a pretty big problem. Operations is invisible. Typically, I would break down a company that does a particular business activity brilliantly (in this case, operations) based on my experience. That’s what I have done with Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success.
Operations, though, is entirely behind the scenes. When I order food from Zomato ( or DoorDash, if you live in the US) all I can see is whether or not my food reaches me on time.
The mammoth operations tasks, that work behind it, go largely unnoticed. But as I kept scratching my head for a good case study, I realized something.
Operations was everywhere. I just needed the correct angles to see it.
And I found myself here, home.
Our home is largely run by a single person. Her name is Chobirani Laha, but I call her Chhobi Pishi (Chhobi “aunt” ). She is our house manager.
What Chhobi Pishi does is nothing short of managing a complicated operations role. Although she was initially hired as a cook, Chhobi pishi soon started taking on many other voluntary responsibilities.
For her, running a home went beyond just feeding its inhabitants. It meant making the lives of all its inhabitants easier and more efficient.
So, she started arranging resources and taking up processes off our plates so that we could concentrate on just our work. Laundry? Instructions for the gardener? Cleaning the house? Whatever it was, Chhobi pishi had our backs, and that gave us so much more time to work on our own projects.
I realized how this was not dissimilar to an operations manager who goes beyond simple accounting and finances. Sure, paying your employees is important. But what an operations employee really does is take up all the internal processes and office management responsibilities off everyone else’s hands.
He optimizes the entire physical and virtual work environment so that other departments could just direct their focus to their jobs.
He finds the right software and the right people, oversees training and development of staff, deals with accounting and finance, and so much more.
Without good operations, none of the other departments would be able to do their job. And when operations is done well, it seamlessly transitions to the background and becomes absolutely invisible.
The fact that it took me so long to figure out Chhobi pishi is a great example of good operations is thus, in large part, thanks to her own amazing work.
In my last year of high school, I too, got some operations experience. I became the Head Boy, and was made responsible for a variety of different aspects of student performance.
(If you’re unfamiliar with the term– Head Boy is the highest rank in a student government, responsible for all matters of student performance and discipline, and acting as a liaison between the students and teaching staff)
Working alongside me, were the people who would execute the specific tasks. Sports captains to build the teams, Cultural secretaries to promote the arts, Discipline in-charges to oversee the discipline, and so on. My day-to-day job was simply to make their jobs easier-
1. Negotiate with teachers to let the sports captains get their athletes to training early2. Make sure the event in-charges have adequate people and resources to conduct an event
3. Help out Discipline prefects to plan a clean School dispersal routine.
And so on…..
Even by not being directly involved in any of the activities personally, I made sure everything was in order by simply creating the right environment for others to work in.
At its essence, that’s what operations is all about. By helping other departments work at their highest efficiency and effectiveness, operations has a huge role to play in the success( or failure) of a business.
And while its efforts are hard to see from outside a company, consider taking a look inside your own home! If you can get your work done quickly, then perhaps that’s where the operations department that you’re looking for, has always been.