Towards Operational Excellence

Part 3 — Mechanisms

Once again, I’d like to express my gratitude to Peter Vosshall, Former Distinguished Engineer at AWS, for the inspiration behind this series of posts. I’d also like to thank my colleagues and friends Olga Hall and Matt Fitzgerald for their valuable feedback.

It takes three interconnecting elements to operate the technology we build successfully. First, you need to have the right culture. Second, you need great tools. And third, you need complete processes.

Part 1 of the series covered the cultural side of Operational Excellence (OE) and examined Amazon’s culture in the context of its Leadership Principles (LPs). Part 2 discussed the role that tools play in achieving OE. Part 3 will cover the final aspect to operational excellence — processes — or what we call mechanisms.

To help you understand the importance of processes, I wanted to share one of my favorite stories from Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. It starts with our customer connection training.

Customer connection training is available to every Amazonian. It was put in place to support Amazon’s mission to be Earth’s Most…