You may have heard of BizOps as a business function, but there’s a good chance you aren’t sure exactly what that looks like day-to-day, or specifically how that plays out at a custom software consultancy like SEP. This post will give you a glimpse into what BizOps looks like for us.
The History of BizOps at SEP
BizOps at SEP began as a business internship program. The first class of business interns (or “bizterns,” as we like to call them) started helping us take on business intelligence, process improvement, and engagement support tasks in 2011.
We started the biztern program knowing that we wouldn’t have full-time jobs to offer them at the end of the summer, but the tasks bizterns worked on evolved into more permanent needs of SEP.
Over time, the roles on the team have fluctuated, but we’ve grown the team from business interns to a cast that has included a Client Engagement Coordinator turned Business Operations Specialist, Business Operations Analyst, Data Analyst, and CX Operations & Enablement Leader.
What is BizOps, anyway?
There’s no one-size-fits-all definition of BizOps because the function looks a little different from organization to organization. However, one broad description that most BizOps teams agree on is that BizOps is a support mechanism for the business. This means helping with everything from optimizing day-to-day operations to carrying out prioritized initiatives to tackling important strategic questions.
Dan Yoo at Coinbase explains in this article that “BizOps offers a view into all corners of a business, along with the opportunity to carry projects from conception to implementation, take on new challenges and have a major impact on the company’s future.”
In another article, Yoo explains, “There’s no “typical” day for a BizOps professional. Team members may shadow co-workers, interview outside experts, develop skills like Python and SQL proficiency, analyze data, lead a brainstorming session, write up a strategic plan, design and monitor pilot projects, conduct postmortems on projects, formulate and monitor key performance indicators, synthesize best practices, interview candidates — or just block off time to think about how to break immense challenges down into manageable chunks.”
At SEP, the BizOps team helps connect different areas of the business, improve processes through insights on our data, and continuously level up our customer experience.
Our Focus Areas
- Customer Experience (CX)
- CX Ops – improve our CX/sales processes and make them better for the future (all about improving our CX efficiency)
- CX Enablement – execute CX/sales processes, facilitate CX Skill Development Program, create CX content, provide conference and sales support (all about improving our CX effectiveness)
- AdminOps
- TechOps – admin tools, build processes in tools, troubleshoot in tools, vet new tools
- Knowledge & Data Governance – create, curate, and govern content and data
- Project Closeout – execute project closeout processes
- Leadership Team Support – organize employee/vendor gifts, team celebrations, etc
- Marketing
- Marketing Ops – optimize our use of our CRM tool, event automation
- Marketing Content – capture project story notes from managers/teams
- Finding and fixing inconsistencies in reporting data
- Capture project stories for use in case studies (like this one)
- Sending client gifts
- Creating an experience report for a client on a workshop
- Planning and facilitating our CX Skill Development Program
- Improving our visitor sign-in process
- Exploring new ways to gather and share customer feedback
- Explore a problem and implement a new solution – we worked with a team of SEPeers to explore how we could improve digital collaboration and then implemented a new tool.
Our Vision
Our vision is to support SEP! Whether that looks like lightening our project teams’ loads by streamlining a process or helping them improve their customer’s experience by thinking through ways to engage with their customer better and holding them accountable, we’re here to help.
