Thank you for writing this. I work as an Operations Consultant and find that EA orgs use the term ‘operations’ to refer to roles and tasks that aren’t deemed as operations in my area of work. I definitely think a lot of the skills I’m picking up in for-profit operations are transferable to EA ops roles, but the core of the roles are quite different.
As Operations Consultants our aim is to make organisations more effective / efficient, eg. by:
Finding bottlenecks and ways of working that are preventing an organisation reaching their KPIs
Using data, analysis, and reason to solve complex problems that improve performance
Implementing improvement cycles to create lasting and sustainable change to an organisation
There are really nice parallels between operations work and the fundamentals of Effective Altruism so I’m excited to see if operations as described in this post can have more of a place in EA!
Also happy to share more examples of typical operations work but think the above ones, and definitions, are good.
Sure! Here are some examples of high level questions you might solve as an Operations Consultant:
How can we most efficiently, and quickly, scale up the production of ventilators from X a month to XX a day
There aren’t enough care worker’s hours to deliver all the care currently needed in a county, how can we increase supply and reduced demand to meet care needs
How can we reduce waste and improve availability in a supermarket
Our team is being held to account on a Quality Assurance KPI but they keep on missing the target, how can we improve adherence
How can we halve tannoy calls to checkouts
How can we increase workforce productivity
How can we get a cheaper price for a key good we sell
A hospital doesn’t have enough hospital beds, how do we free up capacity and increase flow to free up spaces