My first “grown up job” was in Operations, so I have a particular nostalgia for this area of business. In the 6 years I worked preparing for the 2002 Olympic Winter Games I was fortunate to work with some amazing professionals. I was fortunate to work in the Operations department, which is where everything comes together. I started as Event Operations Coordinator, and I was responsible for making sure all these amazing professionals came to agreement about who was doing what, when, where, and with what. There were so many details to be examined, so many possibilities for how things *could* be across all the different sports, venues, and experiences for the Games. It was my job to make sure all the details got collated and communicated across all competition and non-competition venues, as well as the spaces between. And then during the Games time I was Operations Manager for downtown Salt Lake City. My experiences working with such amazing professionals in extreme circumstances has framed my thoughts going forward.

5 S’s for smooth operations

Smooth operations for any event or business come down to five s’s: making sure you have the right:

1. Site,
2. Staff,
3. Stuff,
4. “$tash” (money), and
5. Schedule.

Seems simple, right? And therein lies the beauty of the rule. It’s easy to remember, so it will guide you through your thinking when the thinking gets really complicated. Let’s examine it in more detail because in the Operations stage of the CROP model no detail is safe or too small: optimize all the things. Having a simple checklist to guide your thoughts will really help.

S #1: Site

The first of the five s’s is your site: your physical and digital presence. Site operations are all about maintaining the spaces where value is exchanged. In your office space, this value is work or service performed by your team. On your website, it’s the delivery of your problem-solving product or service.

Physical (Office, Event, and Retail) Sites

In your physical space do you have the right furniture, fixtures, and equipment (FF&E) to meet the needs of your team and/or customers? At the Olympics we had so many spaces. We had competition venues, non-competition venues, offices, and spaces in between. Each type of space had different considerations because they had different purposes. Some needed power, others simply required parking space. Some sites needed the full Olympic experience, some sites needed to stay hidden in anonymity. Depending on the desired outcome from this site, the considerations and details for optimizing their operation (the corresponding staff, stuff, stash, and schedule needs) varied widely.

And so it is for every business, but the underlying question remains the same: what does your physical space need to provide in order to maximize your problem-solving ability?

Digital Sites

Thanks in part to the pandemic, digital spaces are sometimes completely replacing physical spaces. Instead of a conference room table, now we sit around Zoom. These digital sites are as key to smooth operations as “old fashioned” physical spaces. They should become part of our operational 5-S thinking. Do we have the right digital spaces/tools (Zoom, Miro, InVision, Jira, etc.) to create and deliver value, and do they help maximize the other s’s (staff, stuff, stash, and schedule)? If yes, great; all is well. If no, there’s some operational refinement to be done in our digital site.

Websites part 1: the front end & UX

Sometimes your website is just a landing page explaining your services and/or delivering information. It’s a pretty straightforward conversation with the user and the overall delivery experience requires less experimentation.

But sometimes the site is the product, and optimization discussions will conflate: are we examining the website’s operation or the business concept/value…is there a difference? It’s difficult to say whether the core User Experience (UX) is really an operational consideration or not, because it is very much a product-oriented discussion, but for the sake of focusing on value-oriented output, I’ll include UX as an operational consideration here until I’m convinced otherwise.

So when optimizing operations, I’m asserting that the user’s experience in the digital real estate you provide to them is akin to optimizing the traffic flow of a retail store. In the same way you would consider key product placement at eye-level with attractive packaging and signage in a retail store, you must ensure that your digital customer experience is optimized to place value-exchange opportunities within easy reach and ensure that the visitor’s experience is enjoyable and repeatable.

Websites part 2: the back end & hosting

Unarguably, questions about your website performance (outside of the UX) are very important operational considerations. Cloud-based hosting vs onsite servers (and the operation thereof), load-testing, and yes even technical debt and questions such as which tech stack is right for the future are important operational considerations for the overall health of your digital presence–especially because they will have important bearing on the other four s’s: your staff, stuff, stash, and schedule.

S #2: Staff

It seems to me that the subjects of staffing and leadership are well treated elsewhere so I won’t go into as much depth for the second S of Operations. They key to optimizing staffing operations from a CROP model perspective is to ensure that it falls in line with the other s’s: site, stuff, stash, and schedule. In addition to making sure we have the right people on the bus (see Good to Great by Jim Collins) is to make sure we have them at the right time in the right place, with the right compensation, using the right tools.

In preparation for the Olympics, we did an exercise we called dot planning because we literally looked at floor plans of our spaced and placed color-coded dots in the places where we needed a human. Then we specified what the human needed to do there, and when they needed to do it. Based on this, we also specified what credential access, transportation/ingress/egress (we even considered things like “what is their path to the bathroom and what access would be needed to get there”), meals & water, uniform, and other factors needed to be considered in order to ensure that this human could do the job they were needed to do. This went very much in hand with conversations around the equipment/stuff they would need, which I’ll discuss in a moment.

Furthermore, what training would this human need? Where would their training be done, by whom, and when? What supervision/management would this role require? What process and procedures would they follow and how would these ancillary considerations be addressed? (going through the five s’s again!)

We then considered questions like “What if this person gets sick? Do we have the right level of redundancy and cross-training to ensure there is no catastrophic failure in the event of a breakdown here?” and we optimized the staffing contingencies accordingly.

And then we totaled up the dots, evaluated the total cost needed to support these humans with training/management, parking & facilities, uniforms, meals, etc. and looked for overlap. Did the bottom-up budget fit within a top-down budget? Could we consolidate anywhere? What would the prioritization be if there was a gap between our bottom-up and top-down budgets and something needed to be cut? It was a very interesting insight into staffing operations that I’ll never forget: plan to treat your humans like human beings by considering the totality of their needs, and make sure you’re ready to support them before you put them in place to deliver value.

S #3: Stuff

Optimizing the operations of “stuff” within the CROP model has two parts: optimizing the stuff itself, and optimizing its logistics (having/storing it and delivering/retrieving it as needed). Do you have the right things to deliver value, and are they being delivered in the right/most effective way? Here again, this is a simple concept and the devil is really in the details.

Optimizing “stuff” is an inherent consideration in the other s’s. I would argue that “stuff” has no real purpose on its own; stuff is only useful when it’s being used by humans to deliver value in context of the other five s’s of operations. I have seen a company not sell an asset simply because it had more “value” sitting on its balance sheet. This [digital] asset was doing literally nothing for the company. They had acquired it, considered modifying it for use on their product, then discovered they had no appetite/ability to utilize it. When they couldn’t recover the same price they had paid to acquire it, rather than selling it at a lower price and moving on, they simply let it sit on their balance sheet as an asset. To me, this seems stupid, so I don’t advocate this. To me, you should only keep the stuff that delivers actual value and don’t packrat things just to (sometimes artificially) inflate the balance sheet. So I am aware that “stuff as a balance sheet asset” is a thing, but for the sake of this discussion I’m going to ignore that concept.

Instead, I prefer to ask: What stuff do you really need right now in your physical and/or digital site? Is it performing as expected and delivering value as expected? What stuff do your humans need to do their job? How much does this stuff cost? And when do you need it?

S #4: Stash aka $tash (money!)

It’s true what they say: it takes money to make money. But I prefer to phrase it “it takes value to make value.” Optimizing your $tash is all about the cash. Exactly how much cash do you need and when do you need it? Where will it come from? Do you need investment or will your exchange of value generate enough cash to support your site, staff, and stuff on schedule?

Everything has a cost. And it also has an opportunity cost: if you choose to invest your site, staff, stuff and time (schedule) on x, that means you are not investing it in y. What is the cost of ignoring y? These are important considerations in optimizing your stash. Take, for example technical debt. The piper must be paid at some point. Is it really wise to delay this thing? Sometimes the answer is “yes, absolutely.” And sometimes the answer is “well, it might not be wise because…” and then you must choose accordingly. Do you delay knowing that the opportunity cost of investing in x will come back to you later, or now that you know the real cost of y, should it become a priority over x? I’ve never found an accurate crystal ball, and sometimes there are no easy answers; but by evaluating and seeking to optimize your stash, at least you will be better able to make informed decisions.

There are many, many ways to optimize your cash and much has been written about optimizing cash flow. In order to really optimize your stash, you need a financial wizard who specializes in your industry, or at least a complimentary industry because they will understand the nuances of your value exchange and will be able to help maximize your cash.

S #5: Schedule

The final “S” in the Operations phase of CROP is for Schedule. Are you delivering your site, staff, stuff and stash at the right time? What is the “right” time? Take, for example, a skiing event the Olympics. We want bleachers for spectators. But renting bleachers has a cost, and installing bleachers takes time. What is the right balance of delivery/installation time vs rental cost? Is it better to pay an extra week of rental to ensure that no delays from snow, equipment failure, or other catastrophe could cause delay? Is it better to ensure the snow/ice removal people are on standby, and pay them accordingly, in the event of a huge storm the day before installation? Or is it better to save the cash and have a non-bleacher backup plan in case of failure?

These are the kinds of optimization balance decisions each team will make depending on their circumstances. All of the s’s come together with schedule. Adjustments to one will impact another to ensure we’re doing the right things with the right resources at the right time to maximize the exchange of value.