How do you run your team like a BizOps project?

BizOps projects are famous for being organized, thoughtful, creative, goal-oriented, and impactful. Wouldn’t you want to run your internal team with the same best practices that you offer to your customers?

As I described in my methodology post, we use a 3-part methodology to run our projects:

So how do you apply that internally to your own team?

Scoping: Solve the right problem

The first question we always ask: What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?

If your BizOps team doesn’t already have a clear mandate, you need to define your role and clarify what you should be working on. Understand what business metric you’re trying to drive (e.g. decrease costs by optimizing processes) and the value you’re providing.

Summarize your team’s purpose in a mission statement. Make sure that your team understands the mission and can describe it in an elevator pitch. And as you take on new projects, make sure that they continue to help you provide the value you intended.

Once your mission is clear, define your vision for where the team is going. What does success look like for your team in the next 6 months to a year? How can you grow and improve to better fulfill your mission? Set specific, measurable goals to achieve your vision and define a list of near-term actions. My team typically revisits these goals every 6 months to make sure we’re still focusing on the right things.

Design: Use best practices and focus on value

BizOps teams often preach that it’s faster and far more effective to use a method or framework that’s already been built and tested. We advocate for structured approaches and measurable results.

And yet, we don’t always apply those principles to ourselves. Two great places to start:

• Create consistency. Build methodology playbooks to ensure you’re bringing in best practices and training your team members in consistent, reusable approaches. Collect examples of previous great work you’ve delivered on a shared drive. Conduct peer reviews and deliverable shares so team members can see each other’s work products.
• Measure your value. Monitor metrics on your own team’s performance. This can be as simple as a customer satisfaction score on a scale of 1 to 5, or more detailed such as how many dollars were saved by your team’s projects last quarter. It can be really difficult to quantify BizOps impact, and it may take several iterations. My team is still working to get this one right! Regardless of the metric you choose: set a goal, measure your progress, and hold yourself accountable.

Closeout: Collect feedback & keep improving

Although you’re not “closing out” your team, you should definitely have periodic reflections on what has been working well and where you can improve.

• Ask for feedback. Check in with your stakeholders regularly to make sure that the work you’re doing is hitting the mark. What’s working well and what isn’t? Ask what else they’d like to see from you in the future.
• Do a retrospective. Brainstorm on successes and lessons learned with your team. Determine what team processes or materials may need to be revised. This includes your team vision, which typically has a time horizon of a year and may need refreshing.
• Explore new opportunities. Are there any additional ways your team can provide value? Should you expand your service offerings? Keep anchoring back to your mission and vision. Is the work you’re currently doing still the most relevant to achieve your goals? How else can your team continue growing its skills?

Be as rigorous and thoughtful in how you run your team as you are in delivering great work to your customers. All the same keys to reaching a successful outcome apply!