Examples of Digital Operations, Part 1
I’ve spoken earlier about how digital operations is defined and where it fits in the (very!) broad world of organizational operations. But sometimes examples are are a better way to describe a thing.
Over the course of the next two posts, I’m going to share four areas of your business where we can apply good digital operations practices to improve your team’s performance.
Today we’ll cover collaboration and automation.
Collaboration
There’s a tendency to jump right into software and platforms when people are talking about digital operations. But the biggest foundational building block is deciding how your team will collaborate and then writing it down. Establishing policies, standard operating procedures (SOPs), team agreements, or other documentation is an essential step to any successful transformation.
Once you’ve defined why and how you want to work together, finding the right tools and platforms to support that effort is much easier. And you’ll need that leg up because there are a ton of platforms focused on team collaboration: Jira, Trello, Slack, Basecamp, Confluence, Notion, ClickUp…the list goes on. I’d even count MS Office and Google Suite in that list. If you’re not going into that selection process with some hard criteria, you’re just taking a (sometimes very expensive) stab in the dark.
Automation
I feel like automation gets overlooked a lot by smaller teams. It can sound both intimidating and also like something only for big companies. Automation is also kind of hard to wrap your head around at first. But well-crafted routines can save you from monotonous tasks and also give your work an empowering feeling of flow.
Email rules are a simple and easily accessible form of automation. For instance, you could send incoming invoices to a specific folder and give yourself a reminder to check that on a certain day. Suddenly your inbox is clearer and you have peace of mind that all bills will be paid on the same day each month. Or you could forward every customer inquiry to a specific Slack channel that’s monitored by a team of colleagues. Again, no action required on your part and you know the right people are seeing those requests.
But you can go well beyond email. Many of the platforms I mentioned above have their own automation tools built in. Third party services like Zapier and Make can string together multiple services to extend their power. Your devices also have their own automation systems. Apple products have Shortcuts, an app that helps build workflows between apps. Power Automate does similar things on Windows.
For both the question of platforms and automation, the issue is generally one of time. Companies can sometimes find the time to pick a platform and roll it out. But learning to live with it, digging in deep to its power features, and finding ways to extend its reach through automation tends to be more time than they have. This is a place where experts like me can help!
If these topics resonated with you or if you want to learn more about taking your digital operations more seriously, reach out and let’s talk! Consultations are always free and I’d be interested to hear your perspective.
