business-operations-skills

Business Operations — Domain Orchestrator

The BizOps surface is internal: how the company actually runs. This orchestrator forks its conversation context, routes your inquiry to one of six sub-skills, then returns a tight digest to the parent thread. The heavy ingestion (vendor catalogs, process interviews, multi-doc SOP intake) stays in the forked context.

When to invoke

Symptom	Sub-skill to route to
"Where does the work spend most of its time waiting?"	process-mapper
"Is this vendor delivering against the SLA?"	vendor-management
"Do we have enough people to ship in Q3?"	capacity-planner
"I need to brief the company on a re-org"	internal-comms
"Write me a runbook for the incident response process"	knowledge-ops
"Why is our software spend up 40% YoY?"	procurement-optimizer

Routing logic (deterministic)

The orchestrator classifies the inquiry by signals detected in the prompt. Two-signal threshold for confident routing; one-signal triggers a clarifying question.

Signal table

Signal class	Keywords	Sub-skill
PROCESS	bottleneck, cycle time, waiting, handoff, BPMN, process map, workflow	process-mapper
VENDOR	vendor, supplier, SLA, contract, third-party, MSA, SaaS subscription, renewal	vendor-management
CAPACITY	headcount, capacity, utilization, planning, hiring sequence, FTE	capacity-planner
COMMS	all-hands, internal newsletter, announcement, change management, FAQ, town hall	internal-comms
KNOWLEDGE	SOP, runbook, knowledge base, wiki, playbook, documentation, onboarding doc	knowledge-ops
PROCUREMENT	spend, procurement, purchase, supplier rationalization, software audit, SaaS sprawl	procurement-optimizer

If signals are mixed (e.g., "vendor SLA + spend audit"), run the highest-confidence sub-skill first, then chain into the second one in a follow-up forked turn.

Fallback

If no signal class scores ≥ 2, ask one clarifying question naming the two most likely candidates. Do NOT guess silently.

Workflow (Matt Pocock grill discipline)

Derived from Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs pattern: explore-then-ask, one question per turn with a recommended answer, walk the decision tree depth-first, track dependencies, anchor every challenge in the documented canon (references/).

Step 1 — Explore before asking

Before any clarifying question, check:

• Does the user's working directory already contain a process map, vendor catalog, SOP, or org chart we can grep?
• Does the inquiry already disambiguate the lane (e.g., "vendor SLA review" — that's vendor-management, no question needed)?
• Is the lane unambiguous from filenames mentioned (procurement-Q3.csv → procurement)?

If the codebase resolves the lane, route silently. Don't ask.

Step 2 — If still ambiguous, ONE forcing question with a recommended answer

Matt's rule: never bundle questions. Never default to "what do you think?". Always offer your recommendation.

Pattern:

Q1/1: [precise question naming the two candidate lanes]
Recommended: [Lane X, because <one-sentence rationale from the signal table>]

(Confirm, or override?)

Wait for the user's response. Then route. Never guess silently after a turn that asked a question.

Step 3 — Forking decision-tree walk (only if the inquiry crosses lanes)

If the user's inquiry legitimately crosses two lanes (e.g., "vendor SLA + spend audit" = VENDOR + PROCUREMENT), walk the tree depth-first:

1. Resolve the higher-confidence lane first → run that sub-skill in forked context → return digest
2. Ask: "Should we now run [second lane]? My recommendation: yes, because [dependency reason]."
3. Only after explicit user confirmation, run the second sub-skill

Do NOT chain silently. Each fork is an explicit user-confirmed step.

Step 4 — Invoke sub-skill in forked context

Each sub-skill is invoked with the original prompt + a digest of any structured inputs (file paths, JSON inputs). The fork keeps heavy ingestion (vendor catalog, process transcripts, SOP source documents) out of the parent context.

Step 5 — Return digest with cited canon challenge

When the sub-skill completes, return a ≤ 200-word digest to the parent thread:

• What was analyzed
• Top 3 findings (each anchored in a reference doc citation — e.g., "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints: optimize the bottleneck, not the non-constraint")
• Top 3 next actions (named owners if possible)
• Path to the artifact(s) produced
• One grill challenge for the user, cited: "Your value-add ratio is 12%. Lean canon (Womack & Jones 1996) classifies <15% as waste-heavy. What's blocking process redesign — political, technical, or budget?"

The parent agent can then ask follow-ups (each triggering new forked invocations).

Forcing-question library (grill-with-docs pattern)

When the user has provided enough context to enter a lane, the orchestrator may grill them on the decisions inside that lane before invoking the sub-skill. One question per turn, each with a recommended answer + canon citation. Examples:

• PROCESS lane: "Before mapping: do you have measured cycle times per stage, or only estimates? Recommended: insist on measured data for the top-3 longest stages. Anti-pattern (Goldratt 1984): map estimates, optimize the wrong constraint."
• VENDOR lane: "Before scoring: what's your tier-1 criticality threshold — by spend ($X/year), or by operational dependency (revenue-blocking if vendor fails)? Recommended: operational dependency. Anti-pattern (Gartner TPRM): spend-only tiering misses critical low-spend vendors like the HVAC vendor in the Target breach."
• CAPACITY lane: "Before modeling: are you planning for utilization or throughput? Recommended: throughput (Little's Law). Anti-pattern (DORA): planning for utilization > 80% destroys throughput via queueing."

Never run a sub-skill until the lane-defining decision is locked.

Assumptions

1. The user is acting on behalf of an organization with ≥ 10 employees (smaller orgs don't need this surface).
2. The user has access to the data the sub-skill needs (process docs, vendor list, spend export, etc.) — or accepts the skill's templated dummy data.
3. The user wants deterministic, repeatable analysis over LLM-flavored prose. Every sub-skill ships stdlib-only Python tools.

Non-goals

• Not a substitute for an ERP, vendor management platform (Vendr, Tropic), or capacity-planning SaaS (Float, Runn).
• Does not store state across sessions — every invocation is self-contained.
• Does not call external APIs from Python tools (stdlib only, by design).

Distinct from

• business-growth/* — that's the external sales motion (CSM, sales engineering, RevOps). BizOps is internal.
• c-level-advisor/coo-advisor — that's strategic COO judgment ("should we restructure?"). BizOps is tactical ("here's the process map with bottlenecks").
• engineering/slo-architect — that's system reliability with SLO/SLI/error budgets. process-mapper is business process reliability, not system reliability.
• engineering/llm-wiki — that's a personal PKM (Karpathy's pattern). knowledge-ops is company-wide SOP authoring.

Output artifacts

Every sub-skill produces at least one artifact (markdown, CSV, or JSON) saved to the user's working directory. The orchestrator surfaces the file path in the digest.

Anti-patterns (do not)

• ❌ Run all 6 sub-skills "to be thorough" — pick one based on signal, return digest, let user chain
• ❌ Auto-approve a vendor or process change — surface findings; the human decides
• ❌ Edit production process docs without asking — write to a new file, propose the diff
• ❌ Skip the digest step — parent context needs ≤ 200-word digest, not the full sub-skill output

References

• See c-level-advisor/coo-advisor for strategic COO framing
• Path-B build pattern: documentation/implementation/bizops-commercial-expansion-plan.md