Ops Workshop

01The room

Who takes part, and what to bring

Get the people who actually run things: whoever sends the invoices, answers the inbox, does the handoffs, and covers when someone is out. Leadership should be in the room, but the stickies belong to the operators.

This workshop surfaces things people privately work around. Say at the start that naming a broken process is useful, not a complaint.

Setup

• The same kit: 90 minutes, whiteboards, stickies, Sharpies.
• Ask everyone to bring their real week: calendar, recurring tasks, the checklist that only exists in their head.
• Agree on the unit before starting: one sticky is one recurring activity, not a department.

02Phase 1 · 30–45 min

Friction brainstorm

Everything that is manual, slow, duplicated, error-prone, or dependent on one person goes on the wall: one activity per sticky, said out loud. 'Invoices copied from the sheet', 'onboarding emails written each time', 'only Anna can deploy'.

Include the uncomfortable ones: the process that exists only because it always has, the report nobody reads, the approval that nobody ever rejects. Mark every sticky that depends on a single person with a dot. Those become their own list later.

Rounds of ten minutes until two minutes of silence.

03Phase 2 · 30–45 min

Keep, fix, kill

Three columns: Keep (works, leave it alone), Fix (needed but broken: automate, document, or reassign), Kill (stop doing this). Place every sticky as a group.

Kill is the hardest column to fill and the most useful. When a sticky won't settle:

Photograph the board. Anything in Fix that also carries a single-person dot goes to the top of the list.

When a sticky gets stuck

• Ask what it costs per month in hours — counted, not guessed.
• Ask what happens if it stops for two weeks — often the honest answer is nothing.
• Separate the activity from the artifact — a report can go while the number it contained stays.
• Check whether a tool you already pay for does this.
• Skip it — the workflow map in phase three usually decides it.

— Break —

04Phase 3 · 30–45 min

Workflow mapping

Second session. Cluster the Keep and Fix stickies by the workflow they belong to: lead to deal, deal to delivery, delivery to invoice, invoice to cash, hire to productive. Name each flow and draw the handoffs between people and tools.

Look at every handoff and every loop that crosses more than two tools. Those are the automation candidates. Mark the places where work sits waiting; that's usually where the real time goes.

05Phase 4 · 30–45 min

Distilling into the backlog

Transpose the board into an ops backlog: each Fix item gets an owner, how often the pain recurs, and a first step. Rank by frequency times pain: a small weekly problem outranks a dramatic yearly one.

Write the single-person-dependency list separately, each with its backup plan, or 'none' if that's the truth. Close with the automation shortlist: the three fixes where a machine should be doing the work.

06What comes out

The document

An owned, ranked ops backlog; a named workflow map with the waiting points marked; the single-person-dependency list; and the automation shortlist.

This is the operational half of a proposal: the automation shortlist becomes scoped work, and the backlog sets the cadence we build against.