The operations department functions as the backbone of every business by ensuring every other business function is on-track. A competent and effective operations team works towards measuring the output of every business function, evaluating organizational performance, altering business strategy to ensure goals are met, and streamlining the entire business activity.
Productive as an operations team can be, some businesses, unfortunately, undervalue operations by dedicating all their resources to other functions like product or marketing. Small businesses often tend to integrate operations within teams like marketing or human resources. However, this approach prevents knowledge-sharing and collaboration between verticals.
A dedicated operations team can help you drive every aspect of your business efficiently and allow the leaders to focus on more critical and strategic initiatives. But achieving this ideal is no cakewalk. Assembling the ideal operating team and training them to run your business operations smoothly can be quite a challenge.
What are Operations Playbooks?
Playbooks are comprehensive guides that aim to capture the standard operating procedures (SOPs), guidelines, best practices, and other relevant information necessary to carry out your business successfully. Through playbooks, one aims to capture adequate information about business processes to enable continuous and efficient operations even in the face of uncertainties like employee attrition, burnout, procedural inefficiencies, and stakeholder unavailability.
Playbooks are broadly classified as manual, semi-automated, or wholly automated. depending on the size and complexity of a business. Small businesses with limited resources tend to prefer manual or semi-automated playbooks. Large and medium-scale enterprises, on the other hand, benefit the most from an automated playbook. To learn more about different playbook formats and pick the right one for your business, dive into our article on business digital playbooks.
While smaller businesses can make do with a single playbook that captures the entirety of their business processes, such a feat is nearly impossible for bigger enterprises. Hence enterprises tend to create dedicated playbooks for each discipline.
Operations playbooks, hence, capture all the information that an operations department needs to drive, monitor, and improve upon the business processes within your organization.
Benefits of Operations Playbooks
Building an operations playbook might seem like an overhead but the payoffs can be enormous. Some tantalizing benefits of creating an operations playbook include:
Certainly, here are some benefits of operations playbooks presented in bullet format
Standardization
One of the goals of the operations team is to ensure that the organizational processes conform to the best standards and practices defined by the industry. But getting everyone up-to-speed on these practices and ensuring they conform to these standards can be quite vexing. Building an operations playbook can significantly lessen this burden, and the required information is shared seamlessly with people across the board.
Consistent and Streamlined Operations
No matter how hard you try, people are prone to error. Missing out crucial steps in operations can lead to much confusion and loss of time/effort. By creating an operations playbook, you can ensure that the processes in your business are streamlined, consistent, and error-free. If you opt for a fully automated operations playbook, you can even ensure that stakeholders are appropriately notified and procedural errors are highlighted as they occur. Say hello to your dream of error-free operations with operational playbooks today!
Improved Efficiency
Needless to say, playbook creation and automation drastically improve productivity within an organization. Employees can onboard faster, processes are streamlined (and automated), stakeholders are involved at the right moment, and the leadership has a clear, transparent, birds-eye view of operations. With an automated playbook guiding operations, leadership seldom needs to step in. On the other hand, employees receive the guidance they need without the need to approach superiors for every minor inconvenience.
Painting the Bigger Picture
In operations, it’s super easy to miss the bigger picture by being too focused on the task at hand. By capturing what’s important for your business, the strategy that leadership has decided upon, and even the basic processes to get there, an operations playbook paints the bigger picture for every employee within your organization. You can be sure that employees at all levels can be completely aligned with the vision and mission of your business.
Apart from these benefits, operations playbooks provide a host of other benefits common to digital business playbooks in general. Check out the complete list of benefits in our article on digital business playbooks.
Creating an Operations Playbook
Creating an operations playbook involves working with process leaders within your operations team. Inputs from managers and team leaders from other business verticals like human resources, product engineering, and supply chain management are also necessary. By working together, leaders across functions can identify the best methods to measure progress within each vertical. This information is then built into the operations playbook along with other relevant details like organizational strategy, goals, and stakeholder involvement. The entire process can take anywhere from weeks to months depending on the size and complexity of your organization.
FREE Operations Playbook Templates For You!
While building an operations playbook can be rewarding but also taxing. Luckily, playbook experts offer operations playbook templates that capture the industry's best standards. By building upon these templates and tweaking them to suit your organizational needs, you can build a best-in-class operations playbook in no time. Grab a proven operations playbook template from smartplaybooks to redefine business operations today!
