Operations and People Ops
Table of Contents
Purpose
Operations is the process of treating our own team members as “example users” in user research, and collaboratively defining the best pathway forward in any given work circumstances.
Scope
This document will give an initial overview of what operations is presumed to cover in this case and link out to more useful reference docs on our processes.
Check out our Methodology Toolkit at Countable.
Guidelines at Countable
This operations manual is divided into different types of guidelines, depending on their “strictness”.
Unmarked text is simply informational. It’s meant to help you and not to constraint your behaviour.
CONVENTION
Conventions are simply standard ways of doing things to help us collaborate and communicate efficiently. This could include “best practices”.
PROCESS
This refers to a process where there is a good reason to do it a specific way. Processes must be clear and actionable (like a checklist.) We will remind each other to follow these. Processes have a cost, so we want the minimum set necesssary. You should have a good reason if you do not follow a process, and if you disagree with it you should discuss having it changed with the team, not just ignore it.
REQUIRED PRACTICES
We draw special attention to things with severe consequences with this label.
Developing new Guidelines
Most processes will start out as conventions.
As you work, experiment and try things. When you can demonstrate something is working really well, discuss making it a convention with the team. Write it down concisely with rationale in the appropriate ops manual page with a draft tag:
DRAFT
Don’t rush a new guideline. Over time you can refine it out of draft status.
- Be clear about when the guideline applies, what the roles are and why it’s worth having in concise simple language.
- Explain the guidline to team members, and get feedback. Testing a guideline is a consultative decision.
- Our guidelines should be informed by our own experiences and evidence first, consultation with colleagues second, best practices third (processes well known and contained in multiple industry standards), and specific literature from a single author a distant fourth.
- Lead by example, and update your guideline as you learn.
- Get feedback from the team.
After your team reviews the guidline it can be promoted to a
CONVENTION
or just left as informational.
You should get officer (manager) approval before marking anything as
PROCESS
so we can minimize those.
See here for more details on how to write ops manual pages.
Company Structure / Governance
Countable is an agency that uses consulting as a source of information to build start-ups.
Countable has projects, and some of those projects can turn into new businesses (KMC_shifts turned into Cortico in this case).
Those businesses stay in the team as a project for all intends and purposes at first, but over time they may become more independent. This depends on when they need space to focus on different problems than Countable.
This model is to help us reconcile the difference between consulting and start-ups. Consulting is a source of information to help us understand problems in the world. If we solve a problem in this area which is replicable, we can spin it off into a new product/business.