Ops Tempo? What's That?

Hummingbird

The Importance of Recognizing Operations Tempo


In the field of Biology, we see an interesting phenomenon - small animals tend to have a high rate of heartbeat and pulse and live shorter lives, carry their young for shorter intervals inside their bodies and tend to also have a high rate of activity. The hummingbird is a classic example of such a small animal as is a nocturnal creature - the bat.

In the battlefield, we use the word operations tempo to describe the rate at which a battle is fought. Increase the ops tempo and you tend to burn more ammunition, fuel and lose more people. Decrease the operations tempo and you tend to have protracted warfare that allows the enemy to reform, regroup and fight more resolutely. The commander's challenge is to operate at the highest operations tempo possible that a supply chain can sustain (of course ensuring that he has technological superiority and can deliver a convincing blow with the increased operations tempo).

Enterprises have their own operations tempo, partly driven by the nature of their business and partly by the need to compete and match or better a competitor's rate of operations. For the enterprise architect, it is very important to understand the operations tempo of the enterprise she is analyzing.

For the simplistic analyst, who believes that government should operate as a private corporation, is to deny the mismatch between the operations tempo in the government and that in a private corporation. For the government person to believe that their experience in Government qualifies them to lead a fast paced private corporation is also equally simplistic.

Governments have for the most part, been in business for decades if not centuries. They have evolved gradually, increasing their operations tempo with infusions of technology, turnover in personnel and adoption of new laws, policies, rules and regulations. Governments are constrained by legislatures to pay modest wages with little incentives to improve performance.

Private corporations on the other hand are nimble and fleet footed and is able to sustain a very high operations tempo based on providing windfall rewards and rapid rises in positions for their employees. They are able to form their own specific organization structures, supply chains, policies, procedures, processes that are geared towards this high operations tempo. Even within private corporations, there is a diversity of operations tempos. Older, established long lived corporations tend to behave like the Government, while startups that are pre-public offering work at a frenetic operations tempo that is seldom sustainable after they go public.

The classic mismatch is when a person leaves a slow ops tempo enterprise to lead a fast one or when a person leaves a fast paced private enterprise to lead a slow government enterprise. Experience has shown that the transition from one enterprise with a dramatically different operations tempo than another is challenging and few people successfully make it successfully.

Another form of classic mismatch is when two organizations need to collaborate or form different parts of the same value chain. A lot of frustration results when the operations tempos of the two organizations are dramatically different.

Away from enterprise architecture land, in the people world, we tend to categorize people as Type A or Type B personalities. Unconsciously or consciously we are also assigning a value of operations tempo - Type As tends to work at a high rate of operations tempo while Type B's are slower in their operations tempo. Dating, marriages between mixed types or similar types are examples of operations tempo mismatch or match with interesting consequences. Entire families may have a distinct operations tempo and interactions of family members with other family members may be fraught with frustration.
Ignore understanding and factoring in ops tempo as an enterprise architect at your own peril!