Business admin  

Steps to perform an operational analysis

Once 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 a long-term direction to give your company a competitive advantage. But how do you ensure that people on the ground meet the objectives and efficiently? Managers often wonder how they can ensure the performance of all departments and professionals. In fact, they often reflect on what programs or initiatives need to be implemented and what kind of support systems and structures the organization needs. They even think of feedback mechanisms that will ensure that people at various levels and units perform according to expectations and according to strategy.

The key to all of this is to make the organization’s strategy operational. Operations plans align people with the overall strategic plans of the organization. Therefore, operational planning is necessary to keep departments and resources running efficiently each year. Operational planning also provides specific direction and encourages employees to continue to achieve corporate goals.

The first step in creating an operational plan after a performance review would be to conduct an operational analysis where management can establish a basis for their action plans, ensure focus on addressing areas for improvement such as enhancing the strengths of the company, and maximizing available resources and align and integrate in the long term. short-term strategic needs to short-term operational needs. For management professionals looking to perform operational analysis, here are your steps:

  1. Identify and prioritize problems. When conducting an operational analysis, the initial step is to conduct a review of the organization’s system performance and process flow. After which, management should begin to prioritize the issues that will emerge from the performance review. Problems are the gaps that hinder the actual current performance of the organization to achieve 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 achieving the company’s operational objectives.
  2. Analyze problems. From the list of critical problems, create a cause and effect map or schematic for each problem. This exercise will help describe each problem and analyze why it is considered critical. This will also help you see the impact each and every problem has on your overall operational flow.
  3. Summarize problems. From the cause-and-effect maps, draw general conclusions about critical problems. List the initial course of actions that will best address outstanding issues and also create alternative courses of action in case the initial ones are not feasible with the current state of the organization.

Leave A Comment