Steps to perform an operational analysis
After organizations develop brilliant plans to ensure their competitiveness, the truth is that producing the desired results is the biggest challenge. A good strategic plan provides long-term direction to give your company a competitive advantage. But how do you ensure that the people on the ground are meeting targets and efficiently? Managers often wonder how they can ensure the performance of all departments and professionals. In fact, they would often reflect on what programs or initiatives should be implemented and what kind of support systems and structures the organization needs. They even think about feedback mechanisms that ensure people at various levels and units are performing according to expectations and strategy.
The key in all this is operationalizing the organization’s strategy. Operations plans align people with the overall strategic plans of the organization. Therefore, operational planning is necessary to keep departments and resources running efficiently throughout each year. Operational planning also provides specific direction and encourages employees to continue to achieve corporate objectives.
The first step in creating an operating plan after a performance review would be to conduct an operational analysis in which management can lay a foundation for their action plans, ensure focus on addressing areas of improvement, such as enhancing company strengths and maximize available resources, and align and integrate long-term projects. short-term strategic needs to short-term operational needs. For management professionals looking to conduct an operational analysis, here are the steps:
- Identify and prioritize problems. When conducting an operational analysis, the initial step is to perform a review of the organization’s system performance and process flow. After which, management should begin to prioritize the issues that will arise from the performance review. Problems are the gaps that hinder the actual current performance of the organization in achieving its operational objective. To eliminate them, create a list of all the problems that were discovered and eliminate the non-urgent ones to focus only on the most critical ones. Critical issues are those that have the greatest impact on the achievement of the company’s operating objectives.
- Analyze problems. From the list of critical issues, create a cause and effect map or schematic for each issue. This exercise will help describe each problem and discuss why they are considered critical. This will also help to see the impact that each problem has on the operational flow as a whole.
- Summarize problems. From cause and effect maps, draw broad conclusions about critical issues. List the initial course of action that will best address the outstanding issues and also create alternative courses of action in case the initial ones are not feasible with the current state of the organization.