Every Operations Team Is Cross-Functional

Here’s why that matters.

Over the last 25 years, a wide manner of ops functions have emerged within the enterprise: SalesOps, MarketingOps, and Customer SuccessOps (which comprise the field known as RevOps), BizOps, LegalOps, HROps, etc. Basically every business function has grown to maintain an ops-focused arm. This is a good thing for the ops community, because it evinces a certain acknowledgment of how important the ops function is inside the enterprise.

But both those working inside operations departments and business leaders more generally would be wise to remember no ops function operates in a silo. Every operations team is responsible for far more than simply ensuring that their department runs smoothly. In no organization, for example, is the RevOps team solely concerned with the needs and priorities of the RevOps team. Why? Because their needs and priorities inevitably implicate and impact the needs and experiences of every employee in the organization. Even more importantly, the processes they maintain inform how employees throughout the company — both on the sales team and on other teams that interact with sales — spend their time… as they touch multiple points of the business. The solutions they introduce to existing systems, meanwhile, have immense ripple effects. And, of course, the means by which they make their company’s workflows adaptive to disruption and change elevate the adaptability of everyone inside the company.

Similarly, every ops team faces related sets of challenges, and strives to achieve related sets of goals and imperatives. For instance:

• Every ops team must think holistically about the impact of implementing new technologies into existing workflows and systems.
• Every ops team must focus on making processes more efficient and resilient and adaptive.
• Every ops team must think about how to increase efficiency and happiness internally, in an effort to optimize and liberate employees.

This is important to remember for one simple reason: appreciating the reality of what ops teams do and the manner in which their work affects organizations holistically is the only way to ensure those teams receive the resources they need to do their jobs effectively.

And too often, they don’t. Until my team and I built Tonkean, there didn’t even exist a platform designed for and dedicated to ops teams.

As it would happen, such a holistically powerful and dynamically capable platform is precisely what all ops professionals need to do things like creating adaptive, resilient, and efficient workflows that encourage collaboration and effectiveness.

What they also need is access to communities like this one, which endeavors to build awareness and a more genuine understanding of what operations ultimately entails and what ops teams individually do.

Ultimately, I believe that to undermine the demands and importance of the ops function — whether in the context of the legal department or of the sales department — is to incapacitate it. That’s not something organizations can afford to do.

The first step organizations should take to ensure they’re not undermining ops to this extent is to acknowledge the inherently cross-functional nature of the work ops teams do. Operations is unique. We need to appreciate what makes it so.

If you ask me, the organizations that do will be the ones who lead the charge in defining the future.