NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Before you start

Nothing fell

The work is rarely dropped at a handoff. What breaks is the definition, and both sides were right.

0:46. Captions on by default. Everything said here is also written above, so nothing is only in the video.

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Ask an operations team where things go wrong and you will usually be told about a handoff. Ask what was dropped and the answer gets vague, because usually nothing was. Here is the shape of the actual failure. A lead arrives. Sales qualifies it and passes it on, correctly, by their definition of qualified. Delivery receives it and treats it as ready, correctly, by their definition of ready. The customer is disappointed six weeks later. Both teams can produce a defensible account of what they did, both accounts are accurate, and neither one contains the error. The error is that the two teams were using different definitions of the same word, and nothing in the process ever made them say those definitions out loud at the same time.

Ask an operations team where things go wrong and you will usually be told about a handoff. Sales to delivery, delivery to support, support back to product. Ask what was dropped and the answer gets vague, because usually nothing was.

Here is the shape of the actual failure. A lead arrives. Sales qualifies it and passes it on, correctly, by their definition of qualified. Delivery receives it and treats it as ready, correctly, by their definition of ready. The customer is disappointed six weeks later. Both teams can produce a defensible account of what they did, both accounts are accurate, and neither contains the error.

The error is that the two teams were using different definitions of the same word, and nothing in the process ever made them say the definitions out loud at the same time.

That is why seam failures are so hard to see. They do not look like negligence, they look like bad luck, and the people closest to them are the ones least able to spot them, because each side is looking at a correctly executed half.

This course is about making the definitions explicit, and then about what to do when they turn out to differ.

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.