For a COO to achieve operational excellence, he needs to have a better understanding of the critical operational challenges faced by the organization. When it comes to operation management, many of the problems are not visible to the top leaders. If you can detect and find a solution to operational pain areas, then you can get easy buy-ins from leaders for your transformation initiatives to improve operations. Now, to identify opportunities for transforming operations, interactive and playful process maps of the operation processes can be created with the help of process owners. It can help individuals and leaders to understand the various processes and the issues faced when executing those processes. The experiences of operational leadership can also be improved with performance dashboards and engaging observers to monitor the core operations playfully.

It would help if you worked with people who have an in-depth knowledge of processes and operational dynamics. To prepare better for Digital Transformation, how can executives identify those people in their organization? I was developing a tool at INSEAD to visualize people in an organization (see figure below). For example, by posing questions like, who are the people, who are process owners and possess an in-depth knowledge of processes, which process people have rated as a weak process, what is the actual outcome of those processes, and how they are integrated with the system? Those tools have helped many organizations during the ideation process to generate great ideas for process improvements.

Key Takeaways
For identifying opportunities for transforming operations, interactive and playful process maps of the operation processes can be created with the help of process owners. It can help individuals and transformational leaders to understand the various processes and the issues faced when executing those processes.