Operations plans mistakes: six questions a reader asks

A reader who doubts an operations section asks a follow-up question, and the section either has the answer or it does not. Six such questions come next, each paired with the count or the call that answers it, so that nothing has to be improvised across the table.

What to take away

The six questions at a glance

How much do you do in a real week?

The honest answer is a counted week, not a rating. A machine's specification, a room's seat count or a crew's theoretical day describes output as if it ran that way all week, and the plan then quotes it as throughput.

Setup, changeover, travel, cleaning and the gaps between jobs are real and missing from that figure. Count one real week, or estimate the losses explicitly and say you have. Use the lower figure and show the arithmetic, because a defended lower number survives questioning and an undefended higher one does not.

Picture a service business quoting a van's theoretical day. The drive between customers, the setup at each stop and the cleaning afterwards are all missing, so the plan claims more than a real week allows. The reader's follow-up is simply how many jobs a real week held.

When does the money arrive?

Two numbers answer it: days from order to delivery, and days from delivery to payment. Without them the cash flow assumes everything happens at once, in the month of sale, and a reader who has run a business spots that at a glance.

In reality materials are bought first, wages are paid mid-job, the invoice goes out at the end, and the money arrives a month later. The first number tells you how much work must be in progress. The second is the working capital line that the financial projections need.

What goes wrong, and then what?

Give each step one clause on what goes wrong and what you do about it. A plan that describes only the good week describes a business nobody has run, and experienced readers notice immediately.

The clauses can be short: material late, specification changed, job bigger than quoted, work failed inspection, a person absent on the busiest day. Five clauses, and the section becomes credible. The full detail of each response can stay in your own working copy.

Who replaces whom?

Naming a single point of failure is half an answer. One supplier, one licensed person, one vehicle, one platform: each needs a line on what happens during the month it takes to replace them.

An uncomfortable answer is acceptable. No answer is what costs you, because naming the risk and stopping reads as awareness without a plan. Whoever covers a role also has to appear in the team section, with names and hours that match.

Are you allowed to do this?

Name the authority, name the permit, and state your status as held, applied for with a date, or not started. Requirements differ by state, county and city, and they change, so a summary copied from an older plan is not an answer.

A business formed as an LLC, corporation, partnership or nonprofit corporation might need to file for licenses and permits from the county or city. Which permits apply turns on the activity and the place, so ask the issuing body rather than repeating a summary.

If a permission has a lead time, put it in the opening schedule. Before opening, that schedule runs permits, fit-out, equipment delivery, hiring, training and soft launch, each with a duration and a cost. Tracing one order through the process comes once real orders exist.

Where does the data live?

Answer with a short block: how orders are taken, jobs scheduled and invoices raised, which systems hold the data, whether you can get it out, and the manual fallback for the day a system is unavailable. A reader who runs a business notices the absence.

Retention has its own obligations. The IRS says the length of time you should keep a document depends on the action, expense, or event which the document records. Write the rule you follow next to the system that holds the records.

The sheet for what stays open

Read the section with one question: which sentence here could I not answer a follow-up question about? Every sentence that fails is either a count you did not take or a call you did not make.

Write those on a separate sheet with a name and a date beside each. Work through them, and where one stays open, say in the document that it is open. The wider list of contents is in what operations plans include.

The operations checklist is the shorter run over a draft, and the operations review checks the finished section against the rest of the plan.

Common questions

Should I include the failure modes in the version I send?

Yes, briefly. Naming what breaks and what you do about it is what makes the rest believable.

Which answer does a lender care about most?

The timing against the cash flow carries the credit decision, and how the lender reads capacity covers the rest.

How do I answer these before opening?

As a schedule with a duration and a cost for each stage. That schedule is the operations section until there are real orders to trace.