NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

The free course · Volume VI

AI and Automation Operations

It Was Working, and Nobody Could Tell

It was working. That is what everyone said, right up until it was not.

Start with The Automation Reading Or read from the beginning

15 lessons, free, no account and no email field. Each one teaches a single instrument: not an idea, a thing you can do this week and afterwards be able to tell whether it worked.

Take the Operator's Diagnostic first. It spans all eight domains, so it will tell you whether this is the volume you need. The lessons are answers, and answers are hard to hear before you have the question in your own words.

Before you start

What this is, and the sentence the rest of it hangs from.

  1. Start here What this course is, what it is not, and why it deliberately names almost no tools.
  2. It was working Automation rarely fails loudly. It produces plausible output that nobody is positioned to question.

Part one. The Task

What can actually be automated, stated hard enough to be checkable.

  1. The three variables Repeatable, no customisation, no thought. All three, or you are automating something else.
  2. Repeatable, defined hard A four-question audit and a ten-example test, because "repeatable" is a word everybody agrees with and nobody checks.
  3. The four units Business, department, job, task. Automation only ever happens at the smallest of them.
  4. Tool versus task Buying a tool and automating a task are different projects. One of them is frequently sold as the other.

Part two. The Standard

You cannot automate against a standard you cannot state.

  1. The gold standard problem You cannot tell whether output is right without a definition of right that existed beforehand.
  2. The demonstration problem A demonstration is chosen. An audit is not. Only one of them tells you anything.
  3. The one-sentence readiness template If you cannot complete the sentence, you are not ready. It has six blanks.

Part three. The Checker

Who verifies the output, and what they must still be able to do.

  1. The fourth condition The checker must still be able to do the work themselves. Otherwise they are not checking, they are agreeing.
  2. Bainbridge's ironies Automation gives the human the tasks it could not do, and then expects them to catch what it gets wrong.
  3. The work that stays human Some work should not be automated even when it can be, and the reasons are operational rather than sentimental.

Part four. The Decay

Everything automated drifts. Planning for it is the whole job.

  1. Drift Nothing changed and it stopped working. The world moved and the rule did not.
  2. The shovel and the flathead Three kinds of constraint, and only one of them is solved by a better tool.
  3. On method: the failure rate The most quoted number in automation, and why this volume does not use it.

Common questions

Does this course cost anything?

No. All 15 lessons, the videos, the transcripts and the diagnostic are free. There is no account, and no email address is asked for until after the diagnostic has already shown you your reading.

Do I have to take it to sit the NBOP assessment?

No. It is not required, and it confers no advantage. The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this course, and the people who write the questions are not the people who wrote these lessons.

How long does it take?

About two hours to read all 15 lessons, and about ten minutes for the diagnostic. Most operators do not need all of them: the diagnostic points at the three or four that address what it found.

Who is it for?

People who already hold accountability for how work gets done. It assumes you run something. It is not an introduction to operations and it will not qualify anyone to enter the field.

What is the Operator’s Diagnostic?

A nine question instrument from Volume I. You rank the eight domains by how accountable you are for them, say what share of last month each one actually took, and name the external standard you would be judged against for each. The disagreements between those three columns are the findings. It is the front door to every course here, because it spans all eight domains rather than one endorsement worth of them.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practising operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.