Three Essential Applications for an Operations Manager

Operations is a daunting and vague role type. This is because it encompasses all other aspects of a productive business, customer success, sales, marketing, as well as more technical roles, such as coding teams. The goal of an Operations manager is to increase effectiveness and fluidity in a company’s day to day work. This would include time management, ways to increase profit, and making sure that all portions of the business are running smoothly. That being said, there are a few traits that stand out while getting into the operations sphere.

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                                             Trello

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It is essential for an operations manager to be very organized because it is such an all encompassing position. They have a hand in every aspect of a company’s day to day work, so there is a lot to do and a lot of information going through them. There are plenty of applications to use that can help with staying organized. I personally use Trello to organize my daily to-do lists. It’s a simple application that keeps all your tasks in an organized and straight forward list that keeps you on track. I find that using this application to create a task management system helps keep you accountable on all the work that is needed to be done each day.

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                                       Loom

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It is important to be communicative in an operations role because being in operations is kind of like being a teacher. You create new and efficient systems for the other role types and you must be able to teach these new systems effectively. An application that I find crucial for this type of work is Loom. Loom is a video recording software that simultaneously records your computer screen and your face for interactive tutorials. What I find so helpful about Loom is the fact that you can show your audience exactly how to do things the way that it appears on their screen. I think that being able to show and not just tell is imperative to good education.

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                                       Zapier

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A big part of being an operations manager is simplifying existing systems to make them more efficient. A way that we can do that is to eliminate unnecessary touch points in things that we do regularly many times a day. An example of this would be, receiving an email that pertains to scheduling a meeting at a certain time. You would then have to add the meeting to your calendar and your task management system. Using Zapier, you can easily combine all these touchpoints into a timesaving Zap, which would be activated when the initial email is received. This is so important, especially for a salesman, who would have to schedule a large number of meetings on a weekly basis. It just simplifies the system and makes the process more efficient.

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The goal of an Operations Manager is to make all things in a business run smoothly. At face value, it seems like a daunting task, but using applications such as Trello, Loom, and Zapier makes the process more effective and simple.

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