Build out operational reviews program
Roles, responsibilities, & administration
| Information | Date |
|---|---|
| Project start-date: | |
| Project end-date: | |
| Last updated: |
| WG Role | Teammate | Functional Title | Description Responsibilities |
|---|---|---|---|
| DRI | Connor O’Brien | Chief of Staff to CEO | Project execution |
| Exec Sponsor | Connor O’Brien | Chief of Staff to CEO | Vision and support |
| Ops and Alignment | Dan Adler | VP of Operations | Make sure operational reviews are a part of our regular cadence and process as a company, align with board reporting, and ensure minimal overhead is introduced to the company as a result of this project. Act as liaison between Ops and department leadership. |
| CE Functional Lead | ??? | ??? | Represent sales, help craft sales report / review, help ensure financial metrics are integrated and correct with other departments. |
| Data | Lauren Anderson | ??? | Ensure data is flowing in an automated fashion to reduce overhead on reporting. |
| Eng Functional Lead | ??? | ??? | Represent Eng, help craft sales reports / review, help ensure financial metrics are integrated and correct with other departments. |
| Finance Functional Lead | Kendrick Morris | FP&A Manager | Represent finance, help craft finance reports / review, help ensure financial metrics are integrated and correct with other departments. Act as liaison between Ops and department leadership. |
| People & Talent Functional Lead | ??? | ??? | Represent People & Talent, help craft sales reports / review, help ensure financial metrics are integrated and correct with other departments. |
| Sales Functional Lead | ??? | Sales Finance Manager | Represent sales, help craft sales report / review, help ensure financial metrics are integrated and correct with other departments. |
Why?
As Sourcegraph continues to grow in both size and complexity, it has and will continue to become harder to maintain focus and alignment across the company.
Ensuring everyone, on every team, in every department is focusing on the right priorities is critical to Sourcegraph’s success.
Operational reviews will help achieve this alignment and focus by standardizing the medium and the frequency in which information is socialized and discussed at the department level. This will enable Sourcegraph teammates to make better, more informed decisions on how to invest in (or deprioritize) their work in support of our company strategy.
Project mission
Operational reviews are designed to improve company-wide alignment and focus by holding monthly, departmental reviews where department heads socialize, discuss, and report on the critical information, projects, and priorities they are working on to the CEO and the rest of the exec team.
When done well, operational reviews will enable better, more informed decision making across the company on where to support, deprioritize, or re-orient work to better execute against our company strategy.
Expected outcomes
In every session, department heads should expect to:
- Discuss what is being worked on
- Highlight what is working
- Call out what isn’t working
- Identify dependencies and blockers; both internal and external to their department
- Ensure the work being focused on and prioritized within their department aligned to company strategy
Other expected benefits:
- Increased company-wide transparency into the work being done across all departments
- Increased accountability to deliver meaningful results on the projects / priorities / initiatives each department is working on
- Faster identification of key opportunities and challenges (and associated blockers)
- Better recognition of successes and failures.
- Provide regular and consistent feedback on department direction
Project maxims
Understanding, internal reporting project can be cumbersome to the business and ultimately distract from work that should be dedicated to servicing our customers, the operational review wg is operating under the following precepts that operational reviews should:
- Reduce or minimally create administrative overhead
- Automate data capture and reporting to focus time and resources on insights and findings
- Be presented in a way that information is easily digestible regardless of audience
- Build on and align to existing reporting efforts / requirements (board meetings, company meetings, etc.)
Proposal
The following is the high-level project plan for how this group will operate and at what interval(s) we hope to achieve results.
This team will be focused on learning and hitting milestones quickly and iteratively. As such, the working group will roll out operational review incrementally by department.
Operational Review Roll out Schedule:
- Finance & Ops
- Eng
- Sales & Demand Gen
- CE
- People and Talent
Research and Diligence (2-3 weeks)
- Week 1 - Each functional ops lead will meet with their department leadership to gather information on what can, could, and/ or should be communicated as a part of the operational review.
- Week 2 - The operational review working group will take these findings and create a standardized, but open-ended format for each department to use for their operational reviews.
- Week 3 - Continue diligence and operational review format creation as needed.
Host and learn with first 2 (Finance & Eng) operational review (2 weeks)
- Week 4 - Work with the Finance & Ops teams to create the first operational review content / presentation.
- Week 5 - Host first 2 operational reviews.
Iterate to improve operational reviews (2 weeks)
- Week 8 - Use learnings from first operational review to refine and enhance format, follow through, data, etc.
- Week 9 - Host remaining 3 operational reviews.
Proposed cadence, process, audience
- Operational Reviews will be held on a monthly cadence.
- Operational reviews will use standardized decks.
- Roughly 30% of all information should be repeated month over month.
- The rest of information is presented as needed / requested
- All content must be submitted 72 hours prior to the operational review to the CEO, Exec Team, and participating teammates
- CEO and exec team are mandatory
- Required teammates are encouraged to join and present
- Don’t just invite for the sake of inviting. Need to keep meetings small so decisions and frank conversations can be had
Success criteria & ongoing support
Success criteria
- The primary success criteria will be when all department heads meet with executive leadership on a monthly basis and present their department’s work for review, feedback, and challenge.
- The secondary success criteria will be when 80%+ of the reporting, data aggregation, and compliation work is automated.
Ongoing support
- The CEO team will be accountable for ensuring the continued support and success of this project.
- The CEO team will work directly with various functional ops analysts and department for support in creating monthly content
- Continued work will be required with the data team to automate and the aggregation of information and data