Operations consultant @thecryslerclub • I fix what falls between operations, finance, & IT • Building the Operations Workbench for ops leaders & owners
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Joined July 2019
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David Crysler retweeted
Office Hours Live w/Dave Crysler xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1vKpPNMzY…
Can your employees describe what success looks like in their role?
If not, that's not their problem. That's yours.
Customer perception beats perfection every time.
Spend your energy where it actually matters to them.
Executing tasks is not the same as driving transformation.
If your “fractional” operations leader is only doing what they're told... you've got the wrong engagement partner.
David Crysler retweeted
So I've got this friend... he's brilliant.
Has a new business idea or invention on a weekly basis. Endlessly creative, but limited by his 9-to-5.
I know I've also got a soft spot for people looking to "take a shot!" If you do too, you'll appreciate this story.
He has a huge family (siblings, nieces, nephews). They share a family camp in south MS, and spend plenty of time fishing and boardgame-playing.
So what'd he do? Spend two years re-crafting the family classic "go fish!" that you all know. Familiar game, with lots of new snags and twists.
My kids and I have played the game. It's A LOT of fun, especially for the young ones (7-12).
If you're looking for a Christmas gift for a family or some old-school fun for kids, this might be a great option!
If you're not, but appreciate an underdog story, I'd be very thankful for a share.
Either way, how cool is this? Go build something. Have some fun. Take a chance.
kickstarter.com/projects/sna…
Weak Problem Statement: "We have a quality problem."
Strong Problem Statement: "Customer reported misregistration on 30% of orders."
“I can't find people who want to work” is almost never a people problem.
It’s almost always a clarity and consistency problem with leadership.
A company fought the same quality problem for nearly a decade.
Not because they couldn't fix it. Because they never defined it clearly enough to actually solve it.
"Should I hire a fractional COO or a full-time COO?"
That’s the wrong question.
The right one: What specific operational problem am I trying to solve?
Bonus: Am I ready to invest in someone who can help me solve it?
You're searching for "why is my team not executing"...
The real question is: how am I preventing my team from executing?
Without a number to put it in context, every problem looks like a fire. Start with where you are against target.
Why recurring problems come back after you run a 5 Whys, retrain everybody and document the fix.
#manufacturing #rootcauseanalysis #operations #qualitymanagement
Six initiatives sounds doable in a quarterly planning meeting. Why most teams would solve more problems, faster, if they took a beat.
A production manager told me "nobody wants to work" and that he wanted to replace his overnight crew.
A few minutes later he told me where the crew got that attitude: his best production guy, the one who doesn't follow the rules.
"If one person doesn't have to follow the rules, why should everybody else?"
Five new hires would see the same thing. So keep the posting up, and use the first strong candidate as your cue to finally have that conversation.
Cleaning up a quality problem and keeping it from coming back are two different jobs. Most teams think they have done the second one.
Pull your last 10 closed corrective actions.
Count how many end with some version of "operator error, retrained all operators" or "recreated work instruction, retrained all operators."
Then ask how likely each of those problems is to come back. Every one you can't answer with confidence is a fix you're betting on, not one you've actually proven.
I took over a facility that was overstaffed and shrinking.
I had to cut deeper than I wanted to.
This is how I explained the why to the people it affected.
The skill that mattered most when I built my own AI powered email sorting tool was not coding.
I have been writing code and building stand alone apps for more than 20-years. Flat files, SQL, VB, C#, etc. I can read and understand Python but I still did not write any of it for this build. Claude did.
The thing that made the build possible and ultimately effective was knowing what the system needed to do before I opened the code editor. The categorization rules. How to handle the edge cases. The trigger to add a fourth category I did not think I would need.
That is process clarity. It is the skill operators already have and most agencies or consultants pitching AI agents do not.
You can read about the entire project and why I tell clients not to build these tools here: thecrysler.club/process-clar…
