Operational Review

---
name: operational-review
description: Review an operating process for reliability, ownership, bottlenecks, controls, handoffs, and measurable improvement opportunities.
---
# Operational Review

Use when a recurring process is unreliable, slow, ambiguous, expensive, or difficult to manage.

## Procedure
1. Define the process boundary, trigger, expected outcome, and frequency.
2. Map the current flow from trigger to completion, including owners, systems, queues, approvals, and handoffs.
3. Identify failure modes: unclear ownership, manual repetition, hidden queues, duplicate work, missing controls, poor observability, and fragile dependencies.
4. Measure where possible: volume, cycle time, wait time, error rate, rework, cost, and exception frequency.
5. Distinguish root causes from symptoms and one-off incidents from structural issues.
6. Propose improvements in priority order, favoring simple control, ownership, or automation changes before larger redesigns.
7. Define the new operating standard, owner, measurement, and review cadence.

## Quality gate
Recommendations must name the operational problem they solve and how improvement will be observed. Avoid process theater that adds checkpoints without reducing risk or delay.