Operations Management Quarter

Operations Management Quarter (hereinafter, the Quarter) is a lecture introducing the learners to operations implementations primarily through key topics related to operations management. The Quarter is the last of four lectures of Operations Quadrivium, which is the third of seven modules of Septem Artes Administrativi (hereinafter, the Course). The Course is designed to introduce the learners to general concepts in business administration, management, and organizational behavior.

Outline

Process Engineering Quarter is the predecessor lecture. In the enterprise implementation series, the previous lecture is Project Management Quarter.

Concepts

1. Operations management. (1) Practice and a set of concepts, based on that practice, that define culture of managing of operations; (2) A group who is responsible for overseeing all aspects of a customer's production resources.
   • Operations (or Ongoing operations). Repetitive enterprise efforts undertaken in order to create specified deliverables using already designed processes.
   • Management. Coordinating and overseeing the work activities of others so their activities are completed efficiently and effectively.
   • Organizing. Management function that involves arranging and structuring work to accomplish the enterprise goals. Organizing include determining what tasks are to be done, who is to do them, how the tasks are to be grouped, who reports to whom, and where decisions are to be made.
   • Corrective action. Changes made to bring expected future performance of the project in line with the plan.
2. Knowledge management. Handling of enterprise information.
   • 

     Knowledge
     Knowledge. (1) Facts, information, and skills acquired by a legal entity through experience or learning; the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject; (2) Awareness or familiarity gained by experience of a fact or situation.
   • Idea management. Handling of concepts.
   • Strategic flexibility. The ability to recognize major external changes, to quickly commit resources, and to recognize when a strategic decision was a mistake.
3. Value chain management. The process of managing the sequence of activities and information along the entire value chain.
   • Business development. The activity of pursuing strategic opportunities for a particular business or enterprise, for example by cultivating partnerships or other commercial relationships, or identifying new markets for its products or services.
   • Deployment. Introduction of a new activity, procedure, or program to an organization.
4. Compliance management. Management of regulatory compliance for a particular business and/or at a particular enterprise.
5. Management responsibility. The state or fact of managers having a duty to deal with enterprise challenges and/or of having control over subordinates.
   • Symbolic view of management responsibility. The view that much of an organization's success or failure is due to external forces outside managers' control.
   • Omnipotent view of management responsibility. The view that managers are directly responsible for an organization's success or failure.
6. Management function. An activity or purpose natural to a manager.
   • Socioeconomic view of management function. The view that management's social responsibility goes beyond making profits to include protecting and improving society's welfare.
   • Classical view of management function. The view that management's only social responsibility is to maximize profits.
7. Authority. The rights inherent in a managerial position to establish policies and/or give orders to subordinates to expect the orders to be obeyed.
   • Line authority. Authority that entitles a manager to direct the work of an employee.
   • Staff authority. Positions with some authority that have been created to support, assist, and advise those holding line authority.
   • Chain of command. The unbroken line of authority that extends from the top of the organization to the lowest echelon and clarifies who reports to whom.
   • Responsibility. The obligation of expectation to perform any assigned duties.
   • Human resource planning. Ensuring that the organization has the right number and kinds of capable people in the right places and at the right times.
8. Enterprise result. Any enterprise output, outcome, benefit, and/or drawback that effects somebody or something or may be perceived as effecting somebody or something.
   • Enterprise output. Any permanent or temporary, tangible or intangible output that is directly created during an enterprise effort.
   • Enterprise outcome. All consequences of the change derived from using the enterprise outputs.
   • Enterprise benefit. The measurable improvement resulting from an enterprise administration that is perceived or may be perceived as an advantage by one or more stakeholders.
   • Enterprise drawback. The measurable improvement resulting from an enterprise administration that is perceived or may be perceived as an disadvantage by one or more stakeholders.
   • Business report. An account given of a particular business matter, especially in the form of an official document, after thorough investigation or consideration by an appointed person or body.
   • Progress report. An account given of state of a project, operations, or other enterprise effort.
9. Universality of management. The reality that management is needed in all types and sizes of organizations, at all organizational levels, in all organizational areas, and in organizations no matter where located.
   • Conflict management. The use of resolution and stimulation techniques to achieve the desired level of conflict.
   • Diversity management. The process and programs by which managers make everyone more aware of and sensitive to the needs and differences of others.
10. Task. The lowest level of enterprise effort. In Agile methodology, a task is a single unit of work broken down from a user story. In project management, a task is a generic term for work that is not included in the work breakdown structure, but potentially could be a further decomposition of work by the individuals responsible for that work. A task is usually completed by just one person and is a part of an activity.
    • Sprint task. A single small item of work that helps one particular story reach completion.
    • Task board. A physical or online visual representation of user stories broken down into tasks or work units. A physical task board can be as simple as a whiteboard with three columns labeled To Do, Doing, and Done; colored post-it notes or index cards representing tasks are placed in the column that reflects the task's current state. A task board can be expanded to hold more columns and can also include horizontal swim lanes.
    • Task list. A list of tasks needed to complete the set of stories committed to a sprint.
    • Task identity. The degree to which a job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.
    • Task significance. The degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the lives or work of other people.
    • Task structure. One of Fiedler's situational contingencies that describes the degree to which job assignments are formalized and structured.
11. Traditional goal-setting. An approach to setting goals in which top managers set goals that then flow down through the organization and become subgoals for each organizational area.
    • Span of control. The number of employees a manager is directly responsible for.
12. Management approach.
    • Classical approach in management concepts. First studies of management, which emphasized nationality and making organizations and workers as efficient as possible.
    • Scientific management. An approach that involves using the scientific method to find the "one best way" for a job to be done.
    • General administrative theory. An approach to management that focuses on describing what managers do and what constitutes good management practice.
    • Contingency approach. A management approach that recognizes organizations as different, which means they face different situations (contingencies) and require different ways of managing.
    • Contingency variable. A situational factor that moderates the relationship between two or more variables.
    • Management by objectives. A program that encompasses specific mutually agreed-upon goals with feedback on goal progress.
    • Management by walking around. A term used to describe when a manager is out in the work area interacting directly with employees.
    • Evidence-based management. The systematic use of the best available evidence to improve management practice.
    • Green management. Management in which managers consider the impact of their organization on the natural environment.
13. Management process. A set of undefined or tentatively defined activities performed for an enterprise.
14. Adaptive management.
15. DevOps. Practice and a set of concepts, based on that practice, that define culture of unifying software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops). Its signature toolchain represents a chain of tools that fit one of the following categories: (a) Code, (b) Build, (c) Test, (d) Package, (e) Release, (f) Configure, and (e) Monitor.

Roles

1. Managerial role. A specific action or behavior expected of and exhibited by a manager.

   Level	Decisional role				Informational role			Interpersonal role
   Non‑manager	Negotiator	Rarely, allocator	Disturbance handler	Rarely, visionary	Monitor	Disseminator	Rarely, spokeperson	Rarely, figurehead	Rarely, influencer	Liaison
   Frontline		Resource allocator						Figurehead	Influencer
   Middle							Spokeperson
   Top				Visionary

   • Decisional role. A managerial role that revolves around making choices. Henry Mintzberg identified the following four decisional roles: negotiator, resource allocator, disturbance handler, and entrepreneur.
   • Informational role. A managerial role that involves collecting, receiving, and disseminating information. Henry Mintzberg identified the following three informational roles: monitor, disseminator, and spokeperson.
   • Interpersonal role. A managerial role that involves people and other duties that are ceremonial and symbolic in nature. Henry Mintzberg identified the following three interpersonal roles: figurehead, leader, and liaison.
2. Manager. (1) An individual who achieves goals through other people; (2) Someone who coordinates and oversees the work of other people so organizational goals can be accomplished.
   • 

     Managers
     Frontline manager (or first-line manager). A manager at the lowest levels of the organizational structure who manage the work of nonmanagerial employees.
   • Middle manager. A manager between the lowest and upper levels of the organizational structure who manage the work of frontline managers.
3. Functional manager. A manager responsible for activities in a specialized department or function (e.g., engineering, manufacturing, marketing).
   • Line manager. (1) The manager of any group that actually makes a product or performs a service. (2) A functional manager.
4. Task force (ad hoc committee). A temporary committee or team formed to tackle a specific short-term problem affecting several departments.
5. Agile team. A work team that is responsible for committing to work, delivering and driving the product forward from a tactical perspective in terms of Agile methodology. Usually, an Agile team is a small, high-functioning group of five to nine people who collaboratively work together to complete an iteration or project. The team has the necessary skills and competencies to work on the project. Scrum teams are cross-functional; Kanban teams can either be cross-functional or specialists. Scrum teams lack any roles. Kanban teams usually have team leads.
   • Agile team member. A member of an Agile team. Often, Agile team include engineers, architects, developers, analysts, QA experts, testers, UX designers, etc.
   • Team lead. A team member who may or may not have authority over other team members and is appointed on permanent or rotating basis to serve one or more management functions such as (1) to represent the team to the next higher reporting level, (2) to make decisions or to make decisions in the absence of a consensus, (3) resolve conflicts between team members, and/or (4) coordinate team efforts. No team lead is appointed in Scrum.
6. Scrum role. One of the following: product owner, Scrum master, Agile team member.
   • Scrum master. A facilitator for the team and product owner. Rather than manage the team, the Scrum master works to assist both the team and product owner in the following ways: (1) Remove the barriers between the development and the product owner so that the product owner directly drives development. (2) Teach the product owner how to maximize return on investment (ROI), and meet his/her objectives through Scrum. (3) Improve the lives of the development team by facilitating creativity and empowerment. (4) Improve the productivity of the development team in any way possible. (5) Improve the engineering practices and tools so that each increment of functionality is potentially shippable. (6) Keep information about the team's progress up to date and visible to all parties. Scrum master is often viewed as the coach for the team.
   • Product owner. A person who holds the vision for the product and is responsible for maintaining, prioritizing and updating the product backlog. In Agile methodology, the product owner has final authority representing the customer's interest in backlog prioritization and requirements questions. This person must be available to the team at any time, but especially during the Sprint planning meeting and the Sprint review meeting. Challenges of being a product owner: (1) Resisting the temptation to "manage" the team. The team may not self-organize in the way you would expect it to. This is especially challenging if some team members request your intervention with issues the team should sort out for itself. (2) Resisting the temptation to add more important work after a Sprint is already in progress. (3) Being willing to make hard choices during the sprint planning meeting. (4) Balancing the interests of competing stakeholders.

Methods

1. Disciplinary action. An action taken by a manager to enforce the organization's work standards and regulations.
   • Basic corrective action. Corrective action that looks at how and why performance deviated before correcting the source of deviation.
   • Immediate corrective action. Corrective action that corrects problems at once to get performance back on track.
   • Progressive disciplinary action. An approach to ensure that the minimum penalty appropriate to the offense is imposed.
2. Schedule compression. A group of techniques used to shorten the schedule without reducing the scope. The compression is not always possible and often requires an increase in the cost.
   • Crashing. The schedule compression that increases the cost.
   • Parallel tracking. The schedule compression by overlapping tasks and activities that would normally be done in sequence. Performing enterprise efforts in parallel may increase risks.
3. Unity of command. The managerial technique that ensures unity of effort under one responsible person (or commander) for completing a task. In other words, unity of command is a principle, which idea is to make sure that each employee reports to one and only one superior to whom he or she is directly responsible.
4. Unstructured-task technique. An established procedure for resolving completely new tasks or tasks requiring working in unstructured environments.
   • Pair working. A scenario where two team members share a single workstation and work together to develop a single feature.
   • Swarming. Mutual work of team members with appropriate skills work together to complete a task that a team member is having trouble completing on his or her own.
5. Agile methodology (or Agile development methodology). The project management approach of developing increments of prototypes and, eventually, the deliverable in frequent iterations based on evolving requirements. In other words, the Agile methodology is characterized by the division of tasks into short phases of work and frequent reassessment and adaptation of initial objectives. Instead of well-defined projects in the Waterfall model, the Agile one suggests a series of development sprints. This methodology emphasizes clearly-defined development rules with regard to both development and continuous feedback to refine the product scope rather than a predefined development process. This feature makes the methodology instrumental in those development that are inherently unpredictable. The Agile Manifesto was the initial public declaration for Agile methodology related to software. Its authors believed that they found "better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it."
   • Agile. (1) Able to move quickly and easily and/or (2) Agile methodology.
   • Scrum. The Agile methodology that features (a) a self-directed team with no specified project manager and no managers at all, (b) a high level of communication between team members especially through daily meetings called standups, and (c) a product owner who is responsible for continuous feeding tasks to the team. In Scrum, iterations are called sprints and are assigned a fixed length—sprints typically last one to two weeks, but can last as long a month.
   • Lean Agile methodology. An example of lightweight Agile methodology applied to project development. Lean Software Development combines the Lean manufacturing approach pioneered by Toyota in the 1950s (also known as just-in-time production) and Lean IT principles, and applies them to software. LSD places a strong emphasis on people and effective communication. LSD is defined by seven principles: (1) Eliminate waste, (2) Create knowledge, (3) Build quality in, (4) Defer commitment, (5) Optimize the whole, (6) Deliver fast, (7) Respect people
   • Lean UX. Inspired by Lean and Agile methodologies, Lean UX speeds up the UX process by putting less emphasis on deliverables and greater focus on the actual experience being designed.
   • Test-driven development (TDD). The practice of designing and building tests for functional, working code, and then building code that will pass those tests.
6. Kanban. (1) A highly visual framework that falls under the Agile umbrella. The Kanban process uses continuous work flow rather than fixed iterations to produce shippable deliverables. When applied over an existing process, Kanban encourages small, incremental changes to the current process and does not require a specific set up or procedure. Kanban focuses on completing entire projects rather than sprints; (2) A communication system that controls the flow of the shop, and synchronizes the level of production to customer demand, and normally uses standardized quantities and movement tickets which travel with the production pieces from operation station to operation station.

Instruments

1. Software upgrade. The replacement of a software product with a newer, improved version.
2. Scrum meeting. One of the following: story time, Sprint planning meeting, Sprint review meeting, Sprint retrospective, daily standup.
   • Sprint planning meeting. A working session held before the start of each sprint to reach a mutual consensus between the product owner's acceptance criteria and the amount of work the development team can realistically accomplish by the end of the sprint. The length of the sprint determines the length of the Sprint planning meeting, with two hours being equivalent to one week of the sprint. Using this formula, the Sprint planning meeting for a two-week sprint would last about four hours, although this can vary.
   • Daily standup. A brief communication and status-check session facilitated by the Scrum Master where Scrum teams share progress, report impediments, and make commitments for the current iteration or sprint. The Daily Scrum consists of a tightly focused conversation kept to a strict timeframe; the meeting is held at the same time, every day (ideally, in the morning), and in the same location. The Scrum task board serves as the focal point of the meeting. During the Daily scrum each team member answers three questions: (1) "What have I done since the last Scrum meeting? (i.e. yesterday)" (2) "What will I do before the next Scrum meeting? (i.e. today)" (3) "What prevents me from performing my work as efficiently as possible?"
   • Story time. A regular work session where items on the backlog are discussed, refined and estimated and the backlog is trimmed and prioritized.
   • Scrum of scrums. A meeting that is a scaling mechanism used to manage large projects involving Scrum multiple teams. A Scrum of Scrums is held to facilitate communication between teams that may have dependencies on one another. One member from each team attends the Scrum of Scrums to speak for the team—this could be the Scrum Master but may be any team member who can effectively relay information and handle questions or concerns for the team.
   • Sprint review meeting. A meeting that a Scrum team holds immediately following the completion of a sprint to review and demonstrate what the team has accomplished during the sprint. This meeting is attended by the product owner or customer, Scrum Master, Scrum team, and stakeholders. The Sprint review meeting is an informal meeting (no Powerpoint slides allowed). The length of the sprint determines the length of the Sprint review meeting, with one hour being equivalent to one week of the sprint. Using this formula, the Sprint planning meeting for a two-week sprint would last two hours, although this can vary.
   • Sprint retrospective. A Scrum meeting held following the completion of a sprint to discuss whether the sprint was successful and to identify improvements to be incorporated into the next sprint.
3. Unified Process. A customizable framework developed for enterprise administration. This framework emphasizes (a) four project life-cycle phases, in which (b) six "engineering" disciplines such as business modeling, requirements, design, implementation, test, and deployment are applied, as well as (c) the strategic development tripod.
   • Rational Unified Process (RUP). The version of the Unified Process that is trademarked by IBM.

Results

1. Operational plan. A plan that encompasses a particular operational area of the organization.
2. Change request. Any request to change the performance measurement baseline or any other metric approved by a higher authority. Any scope change almost always requires an adjustment to the cost or schedule.
3. Intention for bid (IFB). Communications, written or oral by the prospective sources showing their willingness to perform the specified work. This could be a letter, statement of qualifications or response to a request for proposal.

Practices

Human Perceptions Quarter is the successor lecture. In the enterprise implementation series, the next lecture is Talent Management Quarter.