Still have no idea about operations? An article to help you sort out your thoughts

The operation work is fragmented and disorganized, various things have to be handled at the same time, and the phased goals and key tasks are not clear. I often feel that I am very busy, but in the end I still fail to achieve my operational goals! I work very hard but still get criticized by my boss! How can we handle our operations correctly and efficiently?

You can read today's article with the following questions:

Questions to think about

1. In your operations work, have you ever thought about the purpose of doing everything? Even if it’s a small thing! How much does this work contribute to the achievement of operational goals? How do we measure whether this is done well or not?
2. How to balance short-term and long-term goals in operations?
3. Can you describe in one sentence what your focus is on a day, week, month, quarter or year?
4. In your operations work, do you often find yourself overwhelmed by too many things to do and too many complications? Things are too difficult and you can't push the situation forward?
5. When you make your weekly work report, your leader is more concerned about whether you have achieved your goals? Or how many things you got done this week?

The five questions asked above actually run through the entire cycle of our operations, and correspond to the five aspects of operations: purpose - goal - planning - implementation - evaluation. This article will focus on how to solve the problem of "busyness without purpose" in work through work planning and coordination!

1. Make your work purpose clearer!

Why am I doing this? This is an issue that we must consider when doing operations. If you haven’t thought it through, please don’t start doing it, otherwise you will just be busy in vain! The purpose is to clarify the direction of your work, because once the purpose is determined, all your subsequent work will revolve around this purpose. If the purpose is wrong, all subsequent work will be wrong. Moreover, the clarification of this purpose is not only necessary when you are carrying out large operational work such as an operational project, an operational activity or improving product functions, but also when you are chatting with a single user or making a course PPT on every page, the purpose must be clear.

For example, if we want to have a chat with a user today, we need to be clear about the purpose of this chat. Is it the deepening of user emotions? Or is it the exploration of user needs? Our next steps will be different for different purposes. If our goal is to deepen the user's emotions, you cannot keep asking users questions or digging deep into a certain issue when chatting. What you need to consider is what kind of methods and topics you use when chatting with users can shorten the distance between you and the users and increase the users' favorability towards you or your product. If your goal is to explore certain needs of users, then you cannot spend too much time chatting with users. Before chatting with users, you need to make it clear what needs you need the users to understand and through what kind of questions? What kind of method can quickly obtain corresponding demand feedback from users? Otherwise, you will find that you have talked with users for an hour or two and found that you have not discussed anything. (This is also one of the 21 common problems in operations work, and will be shared in a separate article later)

Let’s take writing PPT as an example. Suppose we want to write a courseware about training speeches. The purpose we need to clarify here is:

What do you want to share with the audience throughout the course?
The courseware is divided into several parts. Why is it divided like this? What are the key points you want to explain in each section?
What is the purpose of each page of the courseware? What kind of content needs to be displayed?
Therefore, when making this sharing courseware, you must not pile up various contents first and then sort out the framework! Instead, you should first sort out the purpose of the framework and then fill in the corresponding content.

Many people list a lot of goals for a job during the operation process, hoping to achieve everything, but in the end, achieve nothing! So here everyone must be clear that no matter what you do, there is only one main purpose! We need to focus on promoting our primary goals.

2. Your motivation actually comes to a large extent from the goals you set!

The biggest difference between purpose and goal is that purpose is to clarify the direction of work, while goal is to measure the effectiveness of work. Goal is phased and needs to be quantified as much as possible. I don’t completely agree with the views expressed in the recently popular speech “Zhang Xiaolong’s latest internal speech: Beware of KPIs and processes”. When it comes to KPIs and processes, we should not worry about whether they should exist or not, but whether the KPIs and processes are reasonable or unreasonable. We should certainly be wary of unreasonable KPIs and processes. Those who work in operations know that whether it is one of our promotional work, a single event, a weekly work summary, a regular meeting report or an assessment of our operational performance, it is measured based on the achievement of our quantified goals.

For example, “We held an event with 10,000 participants.” If we did not set any goals before the event, how should we write it in the event review and summary? Was the event a success or an unsuccessful one? Are some of our hard work on the campaigns effective or ineffective? If the goal we set before the event is to reach 10,000 participants in 5 days, we need to break down this goal here. Assuming that other influencing factors are not considered here and the daily goal is broken down evenly, that is, 2,000 people participate every day, if the number of participants on the first day is only 1,500, it means that our efforts on the first day did not achieve the expected results. Then we will analyze the reasons and increase our efforts on the second day. In response to the problems on the first day, we will try more effective promotion and promotion methods to strive to achieve the target of 2,500 participants on the second day. Only in this way can we ensure the achievement of the overall goal of our event. If we do not set phased goals and control them, we may only have 5,000 participants on the fourth day. How can we achieve the goal of 5,000 participants on the last day? .

There are two purposes for setting phased goals:

We have strong control over an operation. We can measure the effectiveness of the operation through the achievement of decomposed goals and make adjustments accordingly. In the process of setting goals, we need to balance short-term and long-term goals. For example, we set weekly goals for operations, but a lot of operations work is long-term or it is difficult to see obvious results within the target period. Regarding the contradiction between short-term and long-term goals, we can divide the work into the following three parts:

Routine work: that is, some basic operational work that needs to be done around the achievement of goals. Planning work: work that takes a certain period of time in operations and plays a key role in achieving the ultimate goal of operations, such as the improvement of user incentive mechanisms, the establishment of communities , operational processes and specifications, the sorting out of product brand systems, and the realization of a larger product demand and other related work. Transactional work: that is, some work that has little impact on operational goals but needs to be done, such as administrative command work, cross-departmental support work, administrative work within the department, etc.

When we make a weekly work plan, we can focus on these three aspects. For routine work, we need to standardize and streamline it. In terms of ranking the priorities of work, planning work has the highest priority, routine operations work is second, and transactional work has the lowest priority.

3. Operational work is the process of constantly tapping your potential!

I believe that many people will be overwhelmed by various things in the process of operations, and feel overwhelmed. Sometimes they can't help but complain to their leaders. At this time, leaders will often tell you that you need to plan your work, be able to identify priorities, and learn to manage your time. In fact, this is not the leader being perfunctory, because leaders are usually very busy and cannot guide you step by step on how to make work plans, how to sort out your work, how to clarify the priorities of work, nor will they personally guide you how to arrange your time reasonably. You need to arrange and coordinate these tasks yourself. Operational work is a process of constantly tapping your potential!

Operational work may seem trivial and numerous, which can be summarized in the following three aspects:

Multi-threaded processing, multiple tasks, various cross-departmental communication and docking, unexpected work, and the following five aspects will greatly affect your work efficiency during the operation process:

The first is that you cannot distinguish the priorities of your work, and you do whatever you think of, or start doing another thing halfway through, or even do multiple things at the same time.

The second is to deal with various trivial matters, such as handling user feedback, providing some information to other departments, processing a certain form, answering questions from colleagues in other departments, sorting out user needs, etc. These things seem simple and can be completed quickly, but when dealing with these things, you will constantly switch your thinking, and there will be a pause and switch between each task, and even confusion, which will affect your overall work efficiency;

The third is that you are stuck at a certain problem or node in the operation work, and you have no idea, or you can't find a solution after trying many methods, which leads to a lot of work being delayed and not completed;

The fourth is to do things you are not good at, such as video editing, image and text processing, etc.

The fifth is the excessive pursuit of perfection in details, which is the key factor affecting efficiency. For example, when making a data report, many friends often worry about optimizing the borders and shading of the table, always hoping to make the table look beautiful and classy. Another obvious thing is that when making a PPT, people are too concerned with the form and always want to find exquisite templates on the Internet to apply, which obviously reverses the priorities.

What we need to do for the overall planning and coordination of operational work is to be able to state in one sentence the key tasks of your day, week, month, quarter or year!

I believe that many friends who feel that their work is too diverse and tedious and that they are unable to handle everything have never seriously considered this issue! It is very important to identify the key tasks of each stage. There is only one key task in each stage, and all work should be carried out around this key task. The priority of other tasks will be given to the back (except for administrative command tasks). For example, if your key task this week is to promote the launch of a new version of the APP, then all your work will be carried out around this promotion. Moreover, the measurement of your work results and work report this week will mainly depend on the completion of your publicity and promotion goals, rather than how much work you have done for this promotion. Except for the publicity and promotion of the newly revamped APP, the priority and amount of energy invested in all other work are lower than the publicity and promotion of the new version of APP.

When we are overwhelmed with operational work, we can consider solving it from the following aspects:

First, we need to distinguish the primary and secondary priorities of things, consider which things can be separated out, communicate with the leader and ask other colleagues to assist, but the reasons for separating them must be made clear. Not everything should be done by ourselves. This is especially important for mid- and senior-level operators or managers. We should choose what to do and what not to do? We should maximize the value rather than do everything and take on too much. All the work we do should maximize the achievement of our goals and not waste time. In addition, priorities are not only reflected in the content of work, but also in the way of working. For example, when doing user maintenance, we must give priority to maintaining those highly sticky users or key users. For example, when we are doing channel maintenance, if you have more than 30 channels that need to be maintained, your energy must not be evenly distributed to these 30 channels. In fact, among the channels we maintain, 80% of the effect is brought by 4-5 channels. Then at this time, our focus must be on these 4-5 channels, and other channels only need simple maintenance. Even some zero or low-output channels can be directly abandoned.

Second, routine work must be standardized. For example, our daily operations work, as well as the information docking from various channels that may be involved in our work, and the provision of some product copywriting materials to departments. These routine tasks need to be standardized. For the work involving information docking, we cannot wait until it is needed to organize it temporarily. We can organize the information required for different scenarios in advance. In addition, the docking process can also be standardized.

Third, professional matters should be done by professionals. For example, trivial tasks such as video editing and graphic design should be left to professionals as much as possible;

Many complex tasks in operations are to maximize the potential of operations personnel. Generally, the reasons why a task cannot be advanced are nothing more than problems in the following four aspects: tasks, personnel, budget and resources:

There are problems with strategies and methods, and lack of ability, which are mainly manifested in limitations in thinking, budget problems, and resource support problems. Therefore, once there are problems or obstacles in our work, the first thing we need to do is to analyze the reasons from these four aspects and find corresponding solutions. Operation itself is a process of constantly discovering problems, analyzing problems and solving problems.

For example, if the strategy and method are wrong, then adjust the strategy and method in a targeted manner; if you have no ideas, then sort out your ideas. If you are not sure about your ideas, find the leader to communicate and confirm (you must communicate more with the leader to prevent going astray). Generally speaking, the leader’s perspective and ideas on problems will be different, and he has more experience than you and can think of points that you can’t think of. If you encounter a bottleneck in your thinking when solving a problem and you really can't think of a solution, you must not insist on working on the problem yourself.

You must strengthen communication with your leader at work, provide feedback on your work at regular intervals, let your leader know the specific progress of your work, whether there are deviations in direction and thinking, what problems exist, what kind of assistance is needed, etc.

4. Break conventional thinking and solve the problem from the root!

When solving many problems at work, we must break the conventional thinking and consider how to solve the problem from the root rather than dealing with superficial work. What impressed Brother Chao the most was that he had worked in an online education company before. We had a corporate university product. Our target users were traditional small and medium-sized enterprises. For these corporate users, we had an online corporate class functional system. That is to say, after corporate users purchased our corporate university products, we would open corporate classes for these users and assist all employees of the company to join this class (this class assumed some management functions, such as course learning permissions, course management, learning incentives, etc.), and then they could study all courses on the platform for free. However, due to the attributes of the product, many companies usually spend a lot of time on activating class functions after paying. The delivery cycle of the entire product is particularly long, and there are even cases where the product is not delivered for several weeks or even more than a month. This involves the time issue of the business owner, the cooperation of the assigned contact person, and the willingness of the employees. The key to solving this problem lies with the boss and the contact person of the company. In the beginning, many customers were slow to cooperate with us to open classes. We adopted the conventional solution, which was to increase the frequency of telephone communication with the boss and the contact person. This method is definitely effective, but it greatly increased the workload of our operations staff. They have to communicate with customers constantly, which is not efficient and also affects the progress of other work. At the beginning, we only considered increasing the frequency of communication with customers and changing the way of communication. Therefore, we kept asking the operations staff to fight with customers and constantly emphasized to the boss that we must urge the contact person to cooperate with the work of opening classes. However, this method only treats the symptoms and not the root cause. The same problem may be encountered with the next customer. The solution later was to improve the product functions and, at the same time, clarify all processes, rights and responsibilities in the product ordering agreement when the customer purchases the product (because the product involves a relatively high average order value, a product ordering agreement will be signed with the customer), and to standardize all early delivery processes and all types of introductory materials for customers, so as to solve the problem of long delivery cycles at the source.

I believe that everyone will encounter similar problems as above, so when dealing with work problems, we must not treat the symptoms without addressing the root cause, but must solve the problem from the root. When a problem remains unsolved for a long time, you must break out of your limited thinking and quickly communicate with other colleagues or leaders in the team to find an effective solution.

5. Make your work summary more comprehensive!

When you have figured out the previous few questions, a work summary must be the easiest and most fulfilling thing in the operation process. The idea is nothing more than summarizing the completion of indicators at the data level; clarifying the progress of major work, existing problems and subsequent solutions at the work content level. Work summaries must be written with data and be as quantitative as possible. Writing weekly work reports and summaries also requires clear goals. The main goal is to show our interim work results.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

This article was compiled and published by @超哥( Qinggua Media ). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting!