NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

The free course · Volume II

Integrated Operations

Nothing Fell, and the Seams That Break Anyway

Nothing fell. That is the problem.

Start with the diagnostic Or read from the beginning

16 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 a seam fails even when nobody drops anything.
  2. Nothing fell The work is rarely dropped at a handoff. What breaks is the definition, and both sides were right.

Part one. The Definitions

Four words every organisation uses and few of them define the same way twice.

  1. The Four Definitions What a lead is. What done means. Which number is the number. Who the customer is.
  2. The Pronoun Audit Count how often people say "they" about their own organisation. The number is diagnostic.
  3. And then what Follow any process one step past where your responsibility ends. Keep asking until you reach the customer.

Part two. The Seam

What actually breaks when work crosses between people, and why nobody reports it.

  1. Handoffs are not a relay race A baton is an object. Work is an object plus a shared understanding, and only one of them gets handed over.
  2. Stopped, not queued Waiting and blocked look identical on a board and are completely different problems.
  3. Diagnosis is not accountability Finding out why something happened and deciding who answers for it are different meetings.
  4. The photograph Low volume hides defects. The seam that works fine at ten a week is not proven at a hundred.

Part three. The Market

Who you are for, which decides what a good handoff even has to deliver.

  1. The Market Pyramid Sixty percent buy on price, thirty on value, ten on time. Which tier you serve decides everything downstream.
  2. The Tier Exercise Five steps to find out which tier you are really serving, rather than the one you describe.
  3. The four prequalification questions The cheapest seam repair is not accepting work that cannot succeed.

Part four. The Turnaround

Fixing a seam without stopping the work that runs across it.

  1. The Fivefold Turnaround Five steps, in order, for fixing a seam while the work keeps crossing it.
  2. Positive deviance Somebody in your organisation is already doing it right. Find them before designing anything.
  3. Standardise the moving side first At any seam one side varies more than the other. Fix that one, and the other often needs nothing.
  4. On method: the handoff statistic The most quoted number about handoffs, and why this volume does not use it.

Common questions

Does this course cost anything?

No. All 16 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 16 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.