Talk about operational excellence seems to be everywhere. The concept shows up frequently from ambitious goals in OKRs to quick LinkedIn posts.
It’s so prevalent in talks about transformation and growth, that the meaning has been diluted and abstracted — so much so, that it’s difficult to develop specific plans to reach operational excellence.
Never fear! We’ve broken down our phased approach to tackling internal rhythms of business into bite-sized posts to help you hit your operations goals.
- ROB Part 1: Establishing a strong rhythm of business is your shortcut to operational excellence (you are here!)
- ROB Part 2: Get your house in order by implementing your rhythm of business
- ROB Part 3: Use your rhythm of business to refine & align OKRs
- ROB Part 4: The critical role of comms in delivering on your business
Let’s dive into Part 1.
Rhythm of the business
It’s difficult to find specific plans to execute operational excellence…
Enter the rhythm of the business (ROB). Your ROB consists of all the operations & communications pieces that make your business run.
It’s an elevated calendar built on an ethos. Here at Sparklos, we refer to establishing an ROB as getting your house in order — visualizing the pieces you will leverage to accomplish true operational excellence.
Establishing an ROB is your method to achieve operational excellence and more.
- Set a vision & organizational goals that align & energize your team
- Integrate OKRs directly into your operational cadences
- Establish mechanisms for organization communication that reinforce your vision, goals, and rhythms
- Ensure operational excellence is built into team execution
If you think this sounds like a big project, it is. But if you think this sounds like a scary undertaking — think again.
Crafting an intentional ROB is an exciting opportunity to establish yourself as a leader in your company. Additionally, getting your house in order is especially helpful when you begin to manage a new team or department. It is foundational in every operations or efficiency goal.
When we work with clients towards an established ROB, we take a phased approach:
- Document your current landscape
- Get your house in order
- Optimize ROB to all other stakeholders
- Establish vision & strategy as org, company, or industry leader
In the next few posts, we’ll focus on your internal team’s ROB and dissect how to execute the first two phases. Keep in mind that you can retrofit these exercises to incorporate organizational communications.
Document your current landscape
The best place to start is where you are.
Document the current state of your rhythm of business in order to establish an understanding of existing meetings & events — as well as their audience, required prep, and purpose.
Think about your team’s recurring internal meetings and use a table to document them including owners, cadence, primary goal, and agenda. Doing this exercise will give you a high-level executive summary of your current ROB.
Instead of waiting until the action phase to do an assessment, use this time as an opportunity to proactively fill in gaps & identify opportunities. In our example above, we highlighted new meetings to be scheduled in pink and placed a star next to opportunities.
For example, an accomplished CMO at a $200 billion software company stepped in to lead a team with significant morale issues. While documented their current landscape, we proactively marked any opportunities to visually show all the moment for connection and celebration in our ROB table.
Another way to assess your current ROB state is by creating a quarterly overview that plots your team meetings in an easily digestible visualization. This will quickly help you understand your team’s meeting load, as well as help you quickly fill gaps.
For example, at the same software company mentioned above, we needed to build in meetings to prep for company-level quarterly business reviews. Plotting their recurring meetings on a quarterly overview slide allowed us to easily add org-level OKR Reviews & MBRs where time allowed.
You’ll use the current state documentation as a reference guide as you move forward into the next phase: ROB Part 2: Get your house in order by implementing your rhythm of business.
Photo by Bradyn Trollip on Unsplash