If you build features in your systems that the business does not use, if you are surprised by feature creep and unforeseen requirements, and if changes to your systems result in confused, surprised or angry stakeholders, then you lack operational knowledge.
Operational knowledge explained
Operational knowledge is the comprehensive understanding by the organization of how all business units function on a day-to-day basis. It encompasses knowing the workflows, user interactions, and the backend processes that keep the business running.
Operational knowledge exists when both the employees and the managers, across the entire hierarchy, understand how everything works and how the jobs get done. When operational knowledge does not exist, then organization is run entirely by heroics, culture, and chaos.
Symptoms of the lack of operational knowledge
Symptoms of the lack of operational knowledge
First of all, nobody knows how things actually work, both within and across departments, aside from a few managers who have been there a while. Those individuals create a false sense of control, serving as single-person knowledge hubs for the business. And even they usually don’t know everything, rather who are the other single-person knowledge hubs who may be the right person to ask for more information. When such people ultimately leave, it is akin to getting an entire database erased overnight. The institutional knowledge literally walks out the front door.
Secondly, without operational knowledge employees are not fully aligned on how best to execute their work and how best to leverage internal systems. As a result, it might take many months or even years for people working side-by-side to internalize the learned ways of working (a.k.a. “culture”).
The lack of operational knowledge is a big problem for an organization on its own for the above reasons, but it becomes an even bigger headache when management of internal systems is involved.
Take a platform such as Salesforce as an example: a customer success manager may request their platform administrator to implement some changes to the page layouts and implement a few automated workflows. But those changes may not be at all what other customer success managers want and need to support how they work. Not to mention, the requested automations may interfere with how other departments, for instance sales or marketing, choose to communicate with the customers.
In the absence of operational knowledge, internal systems end up being tug of war matches between individuals and business units, leading to systems that never satisfy anyone, and confuse and anger everyone.
5 steps to operational knowledge
Below is Element's own operational knowledge maturity scale. Most organizations are not even aware they lack that understanding of their business operations. It is usually failed system implementations and costly re-works that raise the awareness.
The steps to achieving operational knowledge are:
Stage 1: awareness
Most organizations do not have comprehensive, detailed or accurate information about their ways of working. But there are people within the organization that hold that knowledge in their heads.
The first step starts with identifying and documenting owners and business stakeholders on key capabilities and metadata within your system.
Read how to achieve that here.
Stage 2: capture
Now that you know who are your knowledge holders in the business, the next step is to leverage UPN business process mapping to capture the knowledge of how the business operates today, through discovery workshops, or design the desired To-Be state of operations.
UPN process maps are also the simplest way to help us visualize and articulate business requirements and complete, comprehensive user stories for our systems.
Read how to achieve that here.
Stage 3: documentation
Understanding why a given capability, system or feature exists in our organization and what purpose does it serve is the true mark of having achieved operational knowledge.
By linking your system metadata to relevant processes, you gain both understanding of which process does each feature support, but also ability to understand and assess operational impact of changing your systems.
Read how to achieve that here.
Stage 4: standardization
Admittedly, you can achieve a degree of operational knowledge by heroic activity of few business analysts or system architects. But to unlock this business capability, you really need a standardized approach to process-led-change.
By documenting your own business process for how to drive changes to your organization, and also making process content available in-context to your workforce, you introduce standardization and common understanding of ways of working.
Read how to achieve that here.
Stage 5: business agility
Practicing process-led-change approach introduces a lot of benefits. It helps us build holistic and detailed understanding of ways of working that in turn drive complete and accurate user stories for needed solutions. That helps build truly effective capabilities that are more widely adopted by the business.
But this upfront planning and analysis may also feel like it is slowing-down innovation and delivery. Fortunately, there are capabilities and practices that help organizations have rigorous analysis AND speed of delivery.
Solution guides under construction