Ops people should have the power to say no, since people don’t respect their time.
I think a major skill that any ops person needs to succeed and not burn out in the process is to set the right boundaries and have what I’ll call great “interview skills”. You need to be able to ask the right questions (ideally on the spot) instead of falling into a “reactive mode”
How important is it to get this done today/this week from 1 to 5?
How important is it to you that I do this task quick vs at a high quality level?
What do you think is a reasonable timeline to deliver this?
What does success for this look like?
How is this a bottleneck for other things you’re doing?
If there’s something from this list of things, which would you be OK dropping for 1-2 weeks?
Can we time cap this task?
How does this task relate to our OKRs?
And many other questions an ops person might want to ask. You have to ask yourself what you’re saying yes to and be able to verbalize the negative ramifications of doing this task on a short-notice.
After gathering that information you can actually start negotiating with the other person and only then commit to a deadline/work package.
Another thing that some people might want to try if they feel comfortable (we do this in our team) is to share a list of ongoing requests they are prioritizing during the week and so there’s more transparency around the workload a person has at any given week.
Agreed. One of the things I’ve struggled with is taking the time to interrogate the task rather than diving into it. Power dynamics and desire to please certainly come into play. I suspect that this is common (although I might merely be victim to a typical mind fallacy).
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that having clarity about the task (priority, dependencies, etc.), allows better work to be done. But I think that many employees, especially people with relatively little work experience, struggle with it.
I think a major skill that any ops person needs to succeed and not burn out in the process is to set the right boundaries and have what I’ll call great “interview skills”. You need to be able to ask the right questions (ideally on the spot) instead of falling into a “reactive mode”
How important is it to get this done today/this week from 1 to 5?
How important is it to you that I do this task quick vs at a high quality level?
What do you think is a reasonable timeline to deliver this?
What does success for this look like?
How is this a bottleneck for other things you’re doing?
If there’s something from this list of things, which would you be OK dropping for 1-2 weeks?
Can we time cap this task?
How does this task relate to our OKRs?
And many other questions an ops person might want to ask. You have to ask yourself what you’re saying yes to and be able to verbalize the negative ramifications of doing this task on a short-notice.
After gathering that information you can actually start negotiating with the other person and only then commit to a deadline/work package.
Another thing that some people might want to try if they feel comfortable (we do this in our team) is to share a list of ongoing requests they are prioritizing during the week and so there’s more transparency around the workload a person has at any given week.
Agreed. One of the things I’ve struggled with is taking the time to interrogate the task rather than diving into it. Power dynamics and desire to please certainly come into play. I suspect that this is common (although I might merely be victim to a typical mind fallacy).
It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that having clarity about the task (priority, dependencies, etc.), allows better work to be done. But I think that many employees, especially people with relatively little work experience, struggle with it.