Operations Manager

I am going to describe a process we do every week. It is currently in someone's head with no documentation. Turn it into a proper SOP.

Process: Weekly client billing
Who does it: Accounts executive (Fatin)
Frequency: Every Monday morning

How it works (as described by Fatin):
"So I open the project tracker in Google Sheets, check which projects had hours logged last week, then I cross-reference with the contracts folder on Google Drive to get the rates. Some clients are fixed-fee so I skip those unless there are extras. For hourly clients, I calculate the total, add 6% SST if they are local, create the invoice in our accounting software, then email it to the client with the timesheet attached. If the amount is over RM10K, I need the director to approve before sending. Oh and for government clients, I have to use their specific PO format instead of our standard invoice. Usually takes me about 3 hours."

Create an SOP with:
1. Purpose and scope
2. Prerequisites (what Fatin needs before starting)
3. Step-by-step procedure (numbered, no ambiguity)
4. Decision points as flowchart-style IF/THEN branches
5. Exception handling (government clients, director approval threshold)
6. Estimated time per step
7. Quality checks (what could go wrong and how to catch it)
8. A "bus factor" note: what someone else would need to know to do this if Fatin is on leave

Build a vendor evaluation scorecard for selecting a new office cleaning service. I have 3 vendors to compare and I need a structured framework, not a gut feeling.

Our requirements:
- Office size: 5,000 sq ft, 2 floors, in Bangsar South
- Cleaning frequency: Daily (Mon-Fri), deep clean monthly
- Special areas: server room (anti-static), pantry (food-safe), prayer room
- Staff count: 40 (need enough washroom supplies)
- Budget: RM3,000-4,500/month
- Contract term: 12 months with 2-month exit clause

Vendor A: CleanPro — RM3,800/month, national company, ISO certified, 2-year contract minimum
Vendor B: FreshSpace — RM2,900/month, local company, 5 Google reviews (4.2 stars), monthly contract
Vendor C: PrimeClean — RM4,200/month, references from 3 tech companies in our building, includes pest control

Create a scorecard with:
1. 10 evaluation criteria with weights (total 100%)
2. Scoring rubric for each criterion (1-5 scale with descriptions)
3. Pre-filled scores based on the information above
4. Total weighted score for each vendor
5. Risk factors not captured in the scores
6. 3 questions to ask each vendor in the final round
7. My recommendation and reasoning

Our customer onboarding takes 21 days on average but our target is 7 days. Help me find the bottleneck.

Current onboarding process:
Step 1: Sales closes deal (Day 0)
Step 2: Sales sends handover email to operations (usually Day 1-3, sometimes delayed)
Step 3: Ops creates client account in system (30 minutes of work, but often sits in queue for 3-5 days)
Step 4: Client receives welcome email with login credentials
Step 5: Ops schedules onboarding call (client availability takes 3-7 days to align)
Step 6: 1-hour onboarding call (demo + data migration discussion)
Step 7: Client sends their data export (takes 2-5 days, many back-and-forth emails)
Step 8: Ops imports data (2-4 hours of work, often done in batches weekly)
Step 9: Client confirms data looks correct
Step 10: Client goes live

Team size: 2 operations staff handling all onboarding (plus 15 other responsibilities)

Analyse:
1. Map each step with actual time spent (hands-on work) vs elapsed time (calendar days)
2. Identify the top 3 bottlenecks (where the most time is wasted waiting, not working)
3. For each bottleneck: root cause, quick fix (under 1 week to implement), and proper fix (requires investment)
4. Redesigned process that could hit the 7-day target
5. What to automate vs what must stay human
6. Metrics to track weekly to ensure the process stays fast

Write a post-mortem report for this incident. Make it blameless, factual, and focused on systemic fixes.

Incident: On Tuesday at 2:15pm, our SaaS platform went down for 90 minutes. 340 active users were affected. The root cause was a database migration that ran during business hours and locked a critical table.

Timeline:
- 2:15pm: Monitoring alert fires — API error rate spikes to 85%
- 2:18pm: First customer complaint via WhatsApp
- 2:22pm: On-call engineer acknowledges, begins investigation
- 2:35pm: Root cause identified — migration lock on users table
- 2:40pm: Attempted rollback, but migration was partially complete
- 2:52pm: Decision to wait for migration to complete rather than force-kill
- 3:45pm: Migration completes, services recover
- 3:50pm: All-clear confirmed, monitoring returns to normal

Impact: 90 minutes downtime, 12 support tickets, 2 enterprise clients escalated to CEO

Create:
1. Executive summary (3 sentences)
2. Timeline (minute by minute, as above but with commentary on what worked and what did not)
3. Root cause analysis (5 Whys method)
4. Contributing factors (not root cause, but made it worse)
5. What went well during the incident
6. Action items with owners and deadlines (be specific — not "improve monitoring")
7. Prevention measures — what changes prevent this class of incident entirely
8. Customer communication: draft a brief, honest status page update and a follow-up email to the 2 enterprise clients

Help me plan our office move. We are outgrowing our current space and I need to build a requirements document for the real estate agent.

Current state:
- 35 employees, expecting 50 within 12 months
- Current office: 3,200 sq ft in co-working space, Petaling Jaya
- Problems: no meeting rooms available when needed, open plan is too noisy for sales calls, no space for product demos to clients

Team breakdown:
- Engineering: 15 people (need quiet focus zones)
- Sales: 8 people (need phone booths/call rooms)
- Operations: 5 people (standard desks)
- Product & Design: 4 people (need large monitors, whiteboard space)
- Leadership: 3 people (1 private office for CEO, others can be open plan)

Requirements:
1. Calculate minimum and comfortable sq ft based on Malaysian office standards
2. Zone layout recommendation (which teams sit where and why)
3. Meeting room count and sizing (based on actual meeting patterns for a 50-person tech company)
4. Must-have amenities vs nice-to-have
5. Budget estimate for fit-out (per sq ft, KL/PJ market rates)
6. Hidden costs most companies forget during office moves
7. A checklist for evaluating potential spaces (top 10 criteria, weighted)

Budget constraint: RM25 per sq ft for rent, RM100K total fit-out budget.

Help me prepare a quarterly business review (QBR) for our operations department. Structure the presentation and fill in the narrative around these numbers.

Q1 2026 metrics:
- Tickets resolved: 1,247 (up 18% from Q4)
- Average resolution time: 4.2 hours (target: 3 hours)
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT): 4.1/5 (down from 4.3 in Q4)
- SLA compliance: 91% (target: 95%)
- Team utilisation: 112% (team is overloaded)
- New processes documented: 8 SOPs
- Cost per ticket: RM42 (up from RM38 — driven by overtime)
- Team size: 6 (approved headcount: 8, 2 positions unfilled for 3 months)

Build the QBR:
1. Executive summary — one slide of narrative (what happened, why, what is next)
2. Wins worth celebrating (and why they matter)
3. Misses — root cause for each, not excuses
4. The staffing gap story: connect the unfilled positions to every metric that missed target
5. Q2 plan: 3 priorities with measurable outcomes
6. Resource ask: what I need from leadership (budget, headcount, tools) with ROI justification
7. One process improvement initiative that will reduce cost per ticket by 20% without adding headcount

Audit my team's weekly activities and identify which ones should be automated, which should be delegated, and which should be eliminated.

Weekly time allocation across 4 ops team members (total 160 hours/week):

1. Data entry from paper forms into system: 20 hours/week
2. Generating weekly client reports (pulling data, formatting in Excel, emailing): 12 hours/week
3. Responding to internal Slack questions about processes: 8 hours/week
4. Manually checking inventory levels against reorder points: 6 hours/week
5. Scheduling meetings for the leadership team: 5 hours/week
6. Processing vendor invoices (checking, coding, approving): 10 hours/week
7. Onboarding new clients (account setup, data migration, training call): 15 hours/week
8. Updating project status in 3 different tools (Asana, Google Sheets, client portal): 8 hours/week
9. Monthly compliance reporting (compiling data from 4 sources): 6 hours/week (concentrated in last week of month)
10. Ad-hoc requests from sales team: 10 hours/week

For each activity:
- Verdict: Automate / Delegate / Eliminate / Keep as-is
- If automate: specific tool or method (not "use automation software")
- If delegate: to whom and what training is needed
- If eliminate: why it should not exist
- Hours saved per week
- Implementation effort: quick win (this week) or project (needs 2-4 weeks)

Total target: recover 40 hours/week (25% of total capacity).

Build a practical disaster recovery and business continuity plan for a 40-person Malaysian tech company. We have never had one and our last "near-miss" scared leadership into action.

Near-miss: Last month, a lightning strike knocked out power to our office building for 6 hours. Our servers are cloud-based so the product was fine, but: nobody could work (no laptop charge after 2 hours), client calls were missed, and we had no communication plan. One team called a meeting at a nearby cafe. Others just went home.

Our setup:
- Office: Bangsar South, single location
- Infrastructure: All cloud (AWS + Vercel + Supabase)
- Communication: Slack, Google Workspace, Zoom
- Critical systems: Customer-facing SaaS app, internal project management, accounting
- Team distribution: 35 in-office, 5 full-remote

Build the plan covering:
1. Risk register: top 10 realistic threats (ranked by likelihood x impact for Malaysia — floods, power outages, internet disruption, not just earthquakes)
2. For each of the top 5 risks: specific response procedure
3. Communication chain: who contacts whom, through what channel, within what timeframe
4. Roles: incident commander, communications lead, technical lead (assign by role title, not name)
5. Work-from-home activation: trigger criteria and protocol
6. Critical system recovery priorities (what gets restored first)
7. Testing schedule: how to drill this plan quarterly without disrupting work
8. One-page laminated card version for every employee's desk