Presentation Tips for Operations Managers: The Weekly Review
By Daniel Harper · Career & Business
How should an operations manager present weekly numbers? Show each metric as a trend against its target, not a single week on its own. For anything off target, give the cause, the action, the owner and the date in one line. Frame each metric the same way every week instead of switching to whichever wording looks better, and keep the floor huddle to three points.
Operations managers present more often than almost anyone in a company, and almost always about numbers: the weekly operations review, the monthly business review, the daily huddle on the floor, and every so often a proposal to spend money on a process or a machine. The audience changes, but the job is the same: help people see what is actually happening, and what to do about it.
Show the trend, not the week
A single week's number is mostly noise. Output was down 4% last week; was that a problem, or an ordinary week? Nobody in the room can tell from one number, so the discussion that follows is guesswork.
Show each key metric across the last eight to thirteen weeks, with the target line on the same chart. Now the room can see whether last week is unusual or part of a pattern, and so can you. Say it in words as well: "This is within our normal range" or "This is the third week below target, and it's a real change."
Every red line gets one sentence
For any metric that is off target, the room needs the same four things, every time:
Metric, cause, action, owner and date. "On-time dispatch was 91% against 95%. Cause: two pickers out on Tuesday and Wednesday. Action: cross-training two people from receiving, done by Friday, Priya."
That sentence does more than a slide of commentary. It also separates a cause from an excuse: a cause comes with an action, an excuse does not.
Frame each number the same way every week
How a number is worded changes how it is judged, even when the facts are identical. Irwin Levin and Gary Gaeth showed consumers the same ground beef described as "75% lean" or "25% fat", and the "lean" version was rated more favourably. The effect shrank once people had actually tasted the meat.1
Two lessons follow for an operations review. First, pick one framing for each metric (say, on-time percentage rather than late percentage) and keep it, week after week. Switching to whichever wording looks better on a bad week reads as spin, and once a room suspects spin it discounts everything else you show. Second, the people furthest from the floor are the ones most swayed by framing, because they have not "tasted" the operation. That puts the responsibility on you to describe it plainly.
Fewer metrics, chosen on purpose
An operations review with thirty metrics on the screen is a review of none of them. People can keep only a few things in mind at the same time,2 so the room ends up reacting to whichever number is reddest rather than to the ones that matter most. How much a listener can actually hold goes into why.
Agree five to seven headline metrics with your manager (typically safety, quality, delivery, cost and people) and present those every week. Keep the rest in a pack people can read, and bring one forward only when it explains a headline number.
Explain a bad week without defending it
A bad week presented defensively takes twice as long and convinces nobody. Say what happened, say what was in your control and what was not, and spend most of the time on the action. If the cause was a decision you made, say so first; it is much better coming from you than discovered later.
The monthly review is not four weekly reviews
A monthly or quarterly business review goes to a more senior audience, who will not remember last week's detail and should not have to. Open with the two or three things that changed the month, in plain language, then show the trends. Close with the decisions or support you need from them. If the same problem has appeared in three weekly reviews running, the monthly review is where you stop reporting it and ask for help with it.
The huddle on the floor is a different presentation
The daily huddle is short, standing and often loud. It does not need slides; it needs three things said clearly:
- Safety first. Any incident or near miss, and the one thing to watch today.
- Yesterday's number. One number, against target, said plainly.
- Today's priority. One, not five.
Face the group, keep sentences short, and check that the priority landed by asking someone to say it back. On a noisy floor, a priority nobody heard is not a priority.
Proposing a change
When you ask for money or a process change, use the same order every time: the problem, priced in what it costs per week or month; the change; what it costs and when it pays back; the main risk and how you will manage it; and exactly what you need from the room. A proposal that starts with the solution invites people to look for what is wrong with it. One that starts with a cost they did not know they were paying gets them looking for a fix. The same order works for a status update; presentation tips for project managers covers it in that setting.
References
- Levin, I. P., & Gaeth, G. J. (1988). How consumers are affected by the framing of attribute information before and after consuming the product. Journal of Consumer Research, 15(3), 374. https://doi.org/10.1086/209174
- Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87–114. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X01003922