What an operations review actually involves
The phrase 'operations review' can mean almost anything, depending on who is doing it. Some reviews are desk exercises. A consultant reads your documents and produces a report. Others involve weeks of interviews and observation. Here is what an operations review at Smart Willow Works involves, specifically.
Week one: reading and listening
The first week is mostly intake. We read the documents that describe how the organisation is supposed to work. Process maps, policy documents, meeting minutes, strategy papers. Then we start talking to people: not just the people who commissioned the review, but the people who do the work day to day.
Those conversations are not structured interviews with a scoring rubric. They are open conversations, usually 30 to 45 minutes, designed to understand how the person experiences the work and where they feel friction. People are often remarkably candid when they believe the conversation is genuinely about understanding rather than evaluation.
Week two: observation and testing
In the second week, we test what we heard against what we can observe. We sit in on meetings. We follow a piece of work through the process from start to finish. We look at the data. Throughput, error rates, turnaround times. And compare it to what people described.
The gap between the described process and the actual process is almost always informative. Sometimes the actual process is better than the documented one. More often, there are workarounds and informal fixes that have become load-bearing without anyone formally acknowledging them.
The output
The report is plain language. It ranks findings by impact and feasibility. Not everything is equally important, and not everything is equally fixable. Each finding comes with an honest estimate of what addressing it would require: time, resource, and organisational will. We do not produce a list of 40 recommendations. We produce a shorter list of things that are actually worth doing.
The full list of engagements, including the Operations Review, is on the engagements page.