What should your BizOps team be working on?

A mature BizOps team should have a clear intake & prioritization process. The first step is to clearly define, for yourself and for BizOps’ customers: what is the scope of your BizOps team’s work, and what types of projects do you deliver?

Take these 3 steps when determining your team’s purview:

1. Survey the company landscape. Many teams will have well-defined roles, covering things like corporate strategy, company planning, operational execution, program management, and organizational improvement. Which functions are already sufficiently addressed; where are there gaps? What are the biggest areas of need, and what is the value that BizOps can offer?
2. Determine the engagement model. BizOps will likely play a short term role on projects, most commonly in the Clarify phase and early stages of the Design phase, so it is important to understand the roles of all the other teams involved. Of the existing teams in your company, who are your key business partners, and what does that partnership look like? What areas do your business partners own long-term? Are there cross-functional relationships that are not working well?

3. Set expectations with partners who have handoffs both to & from BizOps. Any partners doing upstream work (strategy, planning) should understand when to start engaging BizOps and what information BizOps will need to be successful. Any partners who will be taking ownership in later phases (implement, rollout) or ongoing maintenance need to be involved in designing the solution and understanding the decisions that we made.

A few examples of what BizOps works on at Zendesk:

• Multiple groups need to align on a design to launch a new go-to-market motion and translate it into an actionable roadmap
• Two different organizations (e.g. Engineering and Customer Advocacy) need to collaborate to create a smooth, fast-moving process for customer issues
• Piloting a new governance & prioritization model for location expansions into new markets

In all of those examples, BizOps drives the vision definition and designs the approach, but our business partners must be ready to take action to implement it, and be comfortable owning it long-term. Close collaboration and clearly defined roles make it successful.

How do you know when BizOps should be working on a project, versus engaging external consultants? We’ll dive into that next week.