CORPORATE ANGLE

Introduction

Operations Manager role is a crucial role in performing it as a bridge between High Level Management Team and the Operations Team. The Operations Manager has to first understand the objectives or goals of the Company or Procedures, as a Whole and break the objectives to suite the team activities that are performed by the individual team members. An operations Manager should be able to sync the individual goals with the Company goals or the objectives. Additionally, The Manager should be able to gain an understanding of how the team should support the firms' objectives and assign the objectives to the team and ensure the task is run smoothly. It is important that the Manager should first learn all the procedures in detail and have a good knowledge of the activities that are performed by his team members. This would help him in resolving the issues and concerns that arises within the team and will be able to handle the escalations appropriately. Necessarily, they should be able to communicate any escalations to the management team with a proper hierarchy so that the issue is being made understood by the Senior Management Team as well.

Operations manager should prioritize his/her workschedulesand ensure that alltherequirements are delivered on a timely manner. Manager should always keep track of the performance of the team members and ensure that the feedbacks are given to the team members on a monthly basis as per the goals set to the team member. This would help the team member to understanding their progress on a month-on-month basis avoiding unnecessary discussion during year end performance discussion. Furthermore, the Operations Manager would take back all the concern and issues of their team members to the senior management team, which can help the management team to take necessary steps to improve the work-life balance and resolve the issue of the teams. This, successively would increase the performance of the teams and also help to achieve the company goals. This is one of the Operations Managers’ Role as a bridge between Management Team and Operation Team. Likewise, Managers also act as a bridge between several other inter-connecting teams to coordinate and ensure his/her process is run smoothly.

What happens when finance and operations operate together?

Operations performs as a skeleton for every organization. It provides supports to different cross functional teams. In this article we will discuss how operations is providing its support to the financial team. Both finance and operations work simultaneously, thus we can say both are crucial for the business incorporations. In generally a typical question might arises that what a finance teamsdo? Wellto answer this hereare few insightsand one can understand the relevance and necessity of financial team.

Majority of the finance team traditional responsibilities are to maintain accounts and create financial weekly reports, monthly reports, quarterly and annually. The importance ofthe finance department has reached to that extent where the company major decisions will be taken by the finance departments. With their expertise, knowledge, the top management is involving the financial teams to take crucial decisions. To understand in a better way few examples are explained in detailed. For example conducting financial planning and analysis in order to facilitate strategic planning. Anay zing financial and planning for realistic forecasts is crucial and difficult. Tremendous efforts will be put by the internal team in order to get the accurate results. Companies major focus is more on getting the accurate results but not the simple results. Forecasting isarecent techniquewhich is helpful forthe manycross functionalteamsand predict how well the firm performs in future. The method compares expected and actual results to find areas for improvement.

Additionally, it enables the company to remain adaptable and manage interruptions like losing clients to a rival. Another example could be managing the risks to avoid unpleasant surprises. For many companies’ debt has become a bane. However, debt is not considered as bad. It does, however, provide a number of hazards. As a result, finance teams work to determine and assess the risks that could affect a company. To forecast measurable impact, it takes into account a number of variables, including interest rates, legal complexities, and more. Financial and operations work together in managing the budget for optimum Return on Investment. Finance department is a treasurer which never runs out of money. However, this money should not be utilized for unnecessary purposes.

To control all these additional expenses operations department, interfere and control the additional non required expenses. As a result, financial experts oversee working capital and produce the appropriate estimates. The group also takes part in capital budgeting to aid in corporate expansion. The best initiatives are found, and the risks of using the capital that is available are evaluated in order to get the best return on investment. How does a typical operations team and finance team collaborate together to perform organization functions

An operations team keeps track ofthe internal aspects that guarantee a business's profitability. It makesan effort to provide allthe necessary circumstances for the companyto producetheproper goods. Operations teams are hence directly related to client satisfaction. Consider the situation ofa restaurant. The management ofthe inventories and raw materials will fallwithin thepurview oftheoperationsteam. But theprocedureistrickier than most peoplerealize. You must guarantee the availability of raw materials as well as their quality and freshness. Your operations will also take into account the price of the personnel, materials, and related procedures. Also, it will aim to establish long-term ties with suppliers and vendors.

Some typical functions are mentioned below:

 Managing and facilitating the optimum use of resources

 Ensuring products and services meet customer needs

 Helping C-suite in planning KPIs

 Assessing customer feedback to suggest improvements

 Optimizing supply chain to boost productivity

 Managing and minimizing costs and risks

Each operations team's ultimate objective is to inspire all stakeholders to support the value of a firm. It also contributes significantly to quality control and enhancing the company's reputation. Theoperationsteam is therefore just as important to anybusiness or entrepreneur as the financial team.

About the Author

Mrs. Rohini Ramapriya is a professional with more than 25 years and a handful of experience and in-depth exposure to the entire spectrum of planning, implementing process management, team management, client serving, escalation, and MIS. She is expertise in developing and motivating highly focused teams which successfully meet and exceed the company’s objectives. Her core competencies are operations management, customer relationship management, quality assurance, MIS reporting, process improvements, SLA management, etc. She is a highly dedicated individual with a reputation for consistently going beyond by using high personal standards to achieve results

Introduction

Agile project Management is a flexible way of building a project management. APM (agile project Management) away by which a project can be managed by dividing it into several sprints. APM doesn’t workondelivering the entire final project at the end, rather it believes in dividing the project into small tasks, eventually it reaches its desired stage. APM process doesn’t needs any supervisor i.e., a project manager and his central authority is not required.

Agile Development Cycle

Agile development cycle methodologies consist of several small cycles. By the end of each stage, we will get a mini project. Let us discuss here the various sprints in detail.

a.) Product Backlog: this module explains the relevant changes in the features, suggests new changes and also other improvements in the project.

b.) Sprint Backlog: In this module there are list of tasks that are yet to complete during each sprint. This module isacombinationofplanning, design, testing and release, and this is acyclic process. By the end of the each sprint there is a mini project that will be delivered to us, and new featured are embedded in each mini project. Every mini project will be playing a significant role for the overall development of the project. After adding the new features to the existing projects and suggesting new, there might be a less change of project failure.

Why industries are turning towards Agile Project Management?

In this era, Agile Project Management has been adopted by various industries, such as software companies, product development, marketing campaigns, and even in construction companies.

The reasons that industries are showing their interest towards agile management are as follows:

1.)Highproduct quality: it refersto thesmooth functioning oftheproject, byfulfilling thedemands ofallthestakeholders. Product qualitytesting is performed throughtheentireproject development process. Regular checks will be conducted to improve the project quality.

2.) High customer satisfaction: projects will be developed based on the customer requirements. Thus, customers are having a keen idea on everything that has been done bythe end of the project. They also expect the project should be delivered swiftly. A difficulty associated is customer may change their requirements at any stage in the project.

3.) Reduced risk: the project is divided into small modules, so even if the risk is vulnerable in the first sprint, it will not affect the second sprint. Risk analysis is simultaneously done with other project processes. Adapting to the client’s requirements all through the development phase is a major phase.

4.) Better Return on Investment: the project is completed in several versions, so the project is market-ready after a few versions. Agile helps in the fast release of the project and help stay ahead in competition with other companies. Agileproject took a long timeto complete and deployearlier can now be released as beta versions of the project.

Steps in Agile Project Management

The goal of agile methodology is to produce shorter development lifecycles and more frequent product releases than traditional waterfall project management.

Agile Project Management: A six methodology framework

a) Project Planning: project planning is a step that ensures everyone understands the end goal and value of that project. Here, the scope is developed and the work is estimated by breaking it into sprints or iterations. This includes feasibility study development of scope dividing the task into executable tasks and the time estimated to complete the tasks.

b) Roadmap Creation: a roadmap is a list of all the features that the final product should have. It acts as a plan of action on how a project will evolve. Hence, the road map is an integral part of the plan as these features are built during each sprint.

c) Release Planning: A plan is made for all feature releases and this plan is revisited at the beginning of each mini project. Agile project methodology uses shorter development cycles, with features released at the end of each cycle.

d) Sprint Planning: it ensures that each team member has an assigned task before the sprint begins. The stakeholders need to plan what is to accomplished in that sprint and that the workload is evenly shared amongst the team.

e) Daily context: these meetings help the team inaccomplishing their daily tasks in anefficient manner. During these meetings, each team member tells what they have accomplished the previous day and what is their task for the present day.

f) SprintReviewand Retrospective: Sprint review and retrospective helpstheteamto inspect itself and plan to make changes to improve the forth coming sprints. Sprint retrospective takes place after the sprint review, and before the next sprint planning.

The evolution of Agile Project management

Businesses face a lot of Volatility, Uncertainty, complexity and Ambiguity. They recognize that agile and the framework that derive from it and provides away to overcome those challenges.

The Agile Manifesto, is a philosophy, has evolved for 30 years. One of the emerging frameworks is called DevOps. DevOps is a combination of development and IT operations. Google platform defines DevOps as an organizational and cultural movement that aims to increase software delivery velocity, improve service reliability and build shared ownership among software stakeholders. Like all other frameworks DevOps aims to shorten the product lifecycle and deliver software products continuously with comprising with the quality. DevOps emerged when software companies were trying to figure out to ensure their software products would run reliably for billions of people across the world. It is a difficult task to break the product into bits and pieces. If a business has the ability to launch product and features fast and reliable to a global market place that’s a significant competitive advantage. DevOps is growing and managing teams and organizations that can build and evolve large – scale systems at a rapid pace. These systems need to be secure and reliable, so they can better deliver value to the customers.

Conclusion

Agile Project Management is a flexible way of building a project management. It helps in managing the entire development process of a project. A team member will be responsible for managing their own sprints and they will be responsible for delivering the product to customers, partners, vendors and other stakeholders. Agile projects are divided into mini projects that can be delivered incrementally over time, so it’s easy to see how Agile Project Management can help businesses achieve their goals.

About the Author

Satish possesses nearly 25 years of industry experience in managing end-to-end complex projects in client intelligence data analytics, finance, legal and compliance domain in banking applying Agile Scrum conceptualization and visualization to technology mapping & execution of projects. Satish has been an Agile champion practicing Agile Scrum since 2012. He has worked with Fortune 500 organizations such as American Express, Credit Suisse, ANZ And is now currently working DBS Bank based at Singapore