OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT PHILOSOPHY

Operational Efficiency

Operations was formerly known as a department which came about from ensuring software remained operational. This has now morphed into trying as much as possible to remove humans from software, automate, and document the impact of these inefficiencies for development prioritization.

Costs

Effectively defining costs of operational issues helps to get them understood and potentially prioritized for a fix to reduce overall company costs.

Performing a value stream mapping exercise on your existing processes should help you to see where the inefficiencies are in terms of time and cost.
Some engineers find importance in doing the same manual work each day, ensure this is automated to keep costs down.
Outlining the true cost of your manual operations will help you to show others the financial impact of not fixing some endemic issues.
Re-analyze your problem solving process to ensure there are no inefficiencies.

Ideals

Operational personnel have a job to identify, quantify, and temporarily solve an issue. Anything past this is going too far.

Make sure the heroes on your team are those which permanently solve issues, not just correct errors.
Your software stack should be run by hardware and software, and not dependent on human intervention to keep it functional.
Operations jobs can make the time fly with busy work to keep the software afloat, never lose sight of major goals.
It can be easy to complain about how bad things are when your job is to see all of the problems, stay positive when discussing them.
Operational issues can be complex to solve correctly, ensure you have a good process for ensuring the right solution.
Never be afraid to try out new ideas, even when they don't work in the pursuit of improvements and efficiency.

People Management

Operations can be a difficult organization to work in for the type of work we do being repetitive, and not always many opportunities for career growth. These are my solutions to these issues. It is important to stay focused on long term goals and not let the normal day to day interrupts of operational life bring you down.

Leadership

Operational and support / triage teams need lots of encouragement and hope, along with the skills needed to ensure they keep a positive attitude about their work and can solve the problems presented to them.

Being a manager does not mean making all of the decisions, the team should feel capable of making the best decisions to ensure accurate and timely resolution of operational and customer problems.
Leaders eat last. The needs of the team come first to ensure a healthy environment.
Leaders should be educators first, as they are the ones guiding future leaders.
Always "keep your hands dirty" as a leader. Make sure you know what its like to do the jobs of your employees.

training

Being an engineer means a lifetime of continuing education to stay abreast of the latest trends. Having a career in operations does not change that.

Generate organic accountability for those who will help you to solve problems to ensure you have willing volunteers to solve problems quickly.
Ensure your engineers are able to code / automate themselves out of the problems they are presented with.
Keeping the team trained / versed in new technologies coming up lets them better support them once released.
Training the team to keep a fresh perspective on their regular operations work ensures no manual work becomes routine.