NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

Volume I · The free course

The Operator's Diagnostic

Nine questions about your own operation, read back to you in plain language, with the lesson that addresses each finding. About ten minutes.

No account. Nothing is kept about who you are unless you ask for the reading to be sent at the end, and there is no phone field anywhere on this site. Your answers are stored without your employer's name because we never ask for it.

One. Where is the operation going?

One sentence, no conjunctions. If that is hard, the difficulty is the first finding rather than a writing problem.

Two. The eight domains, three columns

Fill the columns in the order they appear and do not go back to make them agree. They are collected separately because the disagreements between them are the point.

  • Rank one to eight, most to least accountable. What you own, not what you enjoy.
  • Share of last month, as a percentage adding to one hundred. What you actually did, not what you meant to do.
  • Judged against: the written standard from outside your organisation that would tell you that you were wrong. Your own targets and last year's numbers do not qualify. A blank here is an answer.
Domain Rank Share of last month Judged against
Process architecture You decide how work moves through the organisation: what the steps are, who hands off to whom, and where the controls sit. %
Measurement and reporting You decide what gets measured, how it is defined, and what the organisation sees. You own the numbers people act on. %
Operating cadence You set the rhythm: which meetings exist, what each one decides, and what happens between them. %
Capacity and resourcing You decide how much work the organisation can take on and where people and money go against it. %
Role design and accountability You decide who is accountable for what, and you change role boundaries when they stop working. %
Financial operations You own operational financial mechanics: budget against plan, unit economics, and the controls around spend. %
Systems and tooling You decide what the organisation runs on and how those systems fit together. %
Change and adoption You own whether a change actually lands: not the announcement, the adoption. %

Attention so far: 0%, of 100

Three. Row nine

When did you last look at all eight of these deliberately?

Deliberately means you sat down to do it, rather than being made to look by something going wrong.

Four. About you, all optional

Only bands, never an employer name, and only so the board can see who the practice is reaching. Skip any of it.

Which is closest?
How long have you held operational responsibility?
How many people in the organisation?
Sector

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