The Plain-English Operations Glossary

Operations writing is full of borrowed jargon — some of it useful shorthand, some of it decoration. This glossary defines the terms you will meet across The Ops Manual, and in software marketing, in plain English. Terms are grouped alphabetically.

A – C

Automation

Having software do a repeatable step without a human touching it — sending the reminder, filing the attachment, updating the spreadsheet. Worth it when the step is frequent, boring and rule-based.

Batch processing

Doing many of the same task in one sitting — invoicing weekly rather than one at a time — to avoid paying the switching cost repeatedly.

Bottleneck

The single point in a process that everything else queues behind. Speeding up anything other than the bottleneck changes nothing except the size of the queue.

Bus factor

The number of people who could be “hit by a bus” before a process stops working. A bus factor of one means one person is the process. See key person risk.

Cadence

The rhythm at which something recurs — the weekly job meeting, the monthly reconciliation. A cadence is a decision made once that saves a scheduling debate every time.

Capacity

How much work a person, team or machine can actually complete in a period — as opposed to how much has been promised to them.

Churn

The rate at which customers (or staff) leave over a period. High churn means the bucket leaks as fast as you fill it.

Cross-training

Teaching a second person to do a task competently so its bus factor rises above one.

Cycle time

How long one unit of work takes from starting it to finishing it — job booked to job invoiced. Shrinking cycle time usually beats working harder.

D – K

Dashboard

A single screen showing the handful of numbers that tell you whether the business is on track. Useful in proportion to how few numbers it shows.

Delegation

Handing over an outcome with the authority to achieve it — as opposed to handing over steps while keeping every decision.

Dependency

Anything a task cannot start or finish without: a person, an approval, a part, a login.

Escalation

The agreed route a problem takes when the person holding it cannot resolve it — who to raise it to, and when. Good escalation paths prevent both heroics and sat-on problems.

Handover

Transferring a task, client or role with enough written context that the receiver does not need to rediscover it by trial and error.

Incident

Any unplanned disruption to normal operation, from a broken printer to a full outage. Sized honestly and handled in sequence: stabilise, communicate, fix, learn.

KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

A number chosen in advance to indicate whether an area is healthy — jobs completed on time, quotes converted, debtor days. The discipline is in the choosing, not the tracking.

L – P

Lead time

The time between a request being made and being fulfilled, as the customer experiences it — including all the waiting. Often dominated by queues, not work.

Least privilege

Giving each person only the system access their role needs. Limits the damage any single compromised or misused account can do.

OKR (Objectives and Key Results)

A goal-setting format pairing an ambition (“be the easiest firm to deal with”) with measurable signs it is happening. Useful when goals otherwise stay slogans.

Onboarding

The structured first days and weeks of a new hire, client or contractor: access, context, expectations and the runbooks they will live by.

Ops manual

The collected, current documentation of how the business actually runs — runbooks, checklists, contacts, policies — kept where the team can find them.

Playbook

A pre-agreed set of moves for a recurring situation: the complaint playbook, the outage playbook. Written when calm, executed when not.

Postmortem

The blameless review after an incident or project: what happened, why, and the one or two changes that prevent a repeat. Blameless because hunting culprits hides facts.

Process debt

The accumulated cost of workarounds, undocumented steps and “ask Sam” dependencies. Like financial debt, it charges interest — paid in onboarding time and errors.

Q – S

RACI

A chart naming who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed for each task. Cures the “everyone thought someone else owned it” failure.

Redundancy

Deliberate duplication — a second supplier, a spare terminal, a backup person — so one failure does not stop the whole show.

Runbook

Step-by-step, screenshot-level instructions for one task, good enough that a competent stranger could follow them. The unit of survivable knowledge.

Scope creep

The quiet growth of a job beyond what was agreed, one small “while you're there” at a time, until the price and timeline no longer fit the work.

Single point of failure

Any person, system or supplier whose failure alone stops the business. Found by asking “what breaks if this disappears today?”

Single source of truth

The one agreed place where a fact lives — the job board, the price list. Everything else is a copy that may be stale.

SLA (Service Level Agreement)

A promised standard of service — response within four hours, delivery within five days. Internal SLAs set expectations between teams; external ones bind you to customers.

SOP (Standard Operating Procedure)

The agreed, documented way a recurring task is done here. The backbone of consistency, training and delegation.

Standing meeting

A meeting that recurs on a fixed cadence with a fixed purpose. Cheap when short and decision-focused; expensive the moment it becomes a habit without an agenda.

T – Z

Throughput

How much finished work comes out the end of a process per day, week or month. The number customers actually feel.

Triage

Sorting incoming work by urgency and importance before anyone starts it, so the worst thing is handled first rather than the loudest.

Turnaround time

The promised or typical time to complete a request once received. Publishing it reduces chasing; honouring it builds trust.

Utilisation

The share of available time spent on productive work. Chasing 100% guarantees queues and burnout; slack is what absorbs surprises.

Version control

Any system that keeps prior versions of a document and shows which is current — from formal software to disciplined file naming. The cure for “final_v7_REALFINAL”.

WIP (Work in Progress)

Everything started and not yet finished. High WIP feels busy and ships slowly; limiting WIP is the single most counterintuitive, effective ops habit.

Workflow

The path a piece of work travels from request to done, including every handoff and wait. Draw it honestly and the bottleneck usually introduces itself.