What Changes When an Operations Leader Stops Chasing the Operation
Mitzi Orkus
What Changes When an Operations Leader Stops Chasing the Operation
9:45
Authored by Mitzi Orkus, Director of Strategic Growth, KAStrack
The week starts on Sunday night. Not officially, but that's when it starts for a lot of people running multi-location operations.
You're building a mental inventory. Which inspections were completed last week? Which certifications are about to expire? Which corrective actions are still open? Which sites haven't reported in? By Monday morning, you're working out who gets the email about a missing inspection record and who gets the call about an overdue corrective action.
That's chasing, and it's work on top of the work you're supposed to be doing. Executives don't always see it. What they see is a leader who's responsive, organized, and on top of things. What they don't see is how much of that leader's week goes into gathering information, following up, and piecing together what's actually happening. A capable manager can keep an operation looking well-organized through an extraordinary amount of personal effort. That doesn't necessarily mean the operation is well-organized.
I know that Sunday night well.
I ran my own consulting business for eight years as its only employee. In the beginning, Sunday evenings were for reconstruction. I'd go through spreadsheets and folders, pull notes together from a handful of places, sort everything by client, and build my schedule for the week. I needed to know what I'd done, what I still owed someone, what needed follow-up, and where my time had gone.
The trouble was that I wasn't recording incidents as they happened. My notes came later, after the fact, and they weren't as clear as they would have been in the moment. By Sunday there were gaps, so I'd be filling in the previous week while deciding how to respond in the coming one. If I hadn't written something down when it happened, the follow-up to the client went out late. It cost me time, it cost me confidence in my own systems, and it cost me resources to keep a set of disconnected tools running. The worst part was knowing the real work was on hold until the administration got done first.
I started using KAStrack after my second year, and most of that Sunday-night reconstruction went away. I could track my time and invoices, assign recurring tasks with reminders, and keep records without rebuilding everything at the end of the week. Document management made a particular difference. I had a more reliable way to maintain the information my work depended on, including what changed and when. I still had to run the business, but I wasn't spending nearly as much time figuring out where things stood before I could decide what to do next. Two weeks in, a client commented on how much better the details were that I was capturing and passing along to them.
That stayed with me. At KAStrack, we work with organizations whose operations are far more complex than my one-person business, and we see the same problem on a larger scale: the people responsible for running an operation spend too much time reconstructing it.
What actually changes when the chasing stops
It shows up in the ordinary parts of the week. Instead of starting Monday by contacting five people to find out whether last week's work got done, you start with records that were already captured. Completed inspections are documented. Open corrective actions have an owner and a status. Upcoming certification expirations surface early enough to act on, and unfinished work is visible without anyone having to ask around.
That doesn't mean every item is complete or every record is perfect. It means you can see what needs attention without first reconstructing what happened.
One client shows how far this can go. They used to spend multiple days preparing for an audit. It consumed an entire week. After KAStrack became a part of their daily work, that separate preparation wasn't needed anymore. The records were being created and maintained as the work happened, and they could pull what they needed directly from the system. The audit requirements hadn't disappeared. The work of reconstructing the documentation had.
When you spend less time gathering information, you have more capacity to use it. You can dig into recurring problems, work with site managers on gaps, and see where a process is working. The question changes from "Did this get done?" to "Why does this keep happening, and what should we change?" That's a much better use of your experience.
When the conversation changes
We see this clearly in our Quarterly Continuous Reviews. These are sessions where we sit down with a client's team, on site or online, and look at how their processes are working, where they're running into challenges, and how they're using KAStrack to get more visibility.
A review spent gathering missing information goes very differently from one spent evaluating information that's already available. If the team uses the meeting to figure out which records are current, who owns an unresolved item, or whether a process was followed, there's little time left to look at what those records are telling them. When the information is organized and accessible, the conversation goes further. Are certain locations consistently behind on inspections? Are corrective actions getting completed but taking longer than expected? Is the process itself creating unnecessary work?
Those are leadership questions, and answering them is where operational improvement starts.
The management problem executives don't always see
Good operations leaders can compensate for weak systems for a surprisingly long time. They remember which site manager needs a reminder and where the missing records usually end up. They keep their own spreadsheets and personal lists of unresolved issues, and they follow up until they get answers. From the outside, the operation looks like it's running well.
But what happens when the person takes a vacation, changes roles, or leaves? Or just reaches the limit of how much one person can keep track of? An organization shouldn't depend on someone's memory, persistence, or willingness to work on Sunday night to see into its own operation.
It matters more as you grow. Adding a location adds people, assets, inspections, and certifications, and every one of them is another place for something to slip. If each new site needs proportionally more manual follow up from leadership, growth piles administrative burden onto the operation. Connected records and consistent workflows won't remove the complexity of running multiple locations, but they make it manageable without one person holding the whole picture together.
For an executive, that means clear visibility into operational risk, more consistent accountability, and a better sense of where management attention belongs. For the operations leader, it means leading without carrying every piece of information personally.
What makes it work
The first two articles in this series cover why proof of execution has to be part of daily operations and why frontline adoption is a design responsibility, not a change management problem. Both are prerequisites here. If frontline employees have to stop and document their work somewhere else, records get delayed, incomplete, or skipped. If managers have to pull information from disconnected places to understand what's happening, the administrative burden hasn't gone away. It's just moved.
The goal is a process where the work, the record of that work, and the follow up are connected, with workflows built around how people actually operate, clear ownership, and review cadences that fit the risk. Technology supports that structure. People still do the work, and leaders still make the decisions.
A simple test for your operation
If you're an operations leader, think about how your week starts. Can you see what was completed, what's overdue, and who's responsible without opening multiple spreadsheets, searching your email, or asking people for updates? If not, how much of your week goes towards building that picture?
If you're an executive, think about what it takes for your operations leader to give you an accurate status report. Are they reviewing information that's already available, or spending hours collecting and organizing it for you? The final report can look exactly the same either way. One is management. The other is preparation for management.
Where this leaves you
The point isn’t that operations leaders should work less. It’s that their effort should go toward running the operation instead of reconstructing it. When the work, the record of that work, and the follow-up are connected, leaders can spend Monday on recurring problems and decisions rather than gathering status, and executives get a more reliable view of risk and growth without depending on one person’s Sunday night.
If you’d like to look at how this applies to your operation, we’ll start with how information moves today, where leaders end up chasing it, and what it would take to change that.
Have a question about this? Email Mitzi directly at morkus@kastrack.com.
About the author: Mitzi Orkus, a petroleum engineer turned growth strategist, is the Director of Strategic Growth at KAStrack. Before joining the company, she was a client for six years, using KAStrack to improve the way she ran her own business. Today, she helps other organizations move from chasing proof to producing it as part of how work is done.
Read the earlier articles in this series:
