You're considering a career in Business Operations. What emerging trends will shape your future?

Automation is becoming more prevalent in business operations, as it should. It allows us to streamline repetitive tasks and increase efficiency. In turn, this allows teams to focus on more strategic and creative work, enhancing overall productivity. Beware, however, the temptation to automate for the sake of automation: unless your process is well-defined and thought out, automation might skip some checks that a human could easily catch.

Increasingly biz ops professionals are tasked with making evidence-based decisions. Sadly, data analysis is only used in superficial ways. Future talent should cultivate expertise in three areas of data analysis: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. In the primary aspects of analysis, one learns to describe the reality of a current moment in time. This data may only lead to basic counts and averages. It is where "analytics" stop for many. The secondary aspect examines relationships among the data to infer possibilities that affected the reality. Understanding correlations and hypothesis development is vital. The tertiary aspect leads us to predictions. Biz ops pros must use the totality of data to think critically about potential scenarios.

The use of data analytics is growing, helping businesses make informed decisions based on real-time insights. Having said this, our quest for more and more insights can easily lead us onto a path of overloading our tech stack: there's a middle ground, find it by asking yourself what is the incremental value of each tool you consider adding to your stack.

More companies are adopting agile methodologies to stay flexible and responsive to market changes, and they do so within Business Operations teams as well. Agile practices typically lead to continuous improvement cycles, faster delivery, better collaboration. For those of us in BizOps, Agile tends to help manage stakeholders across various units / departments / functions; at the same time, "too much Agile" can also be a hindrance when "process for the sake of process" becomes the core focus.

There's a strong push towards sustainability across most industries that I'm aware of, and the Business Operations function does tend to be at the forefront of sustainability-focused efforts. Specifically, sustainability is starting to shape policies and processes that BizOps relies on.

The shift to a remote workforce is transforming Business Operations just like most other functions, offering greater flexibility and access to a global talent pool. In my experience, BizOps is one of the areas where a remote culture can work very well. It does, however, require a robust digital infrastructure and effective communication tools to maintain productivity and team cohesion.