What is business acumen? Business acumen as a leadership competency simply defined as a general understanding of business principles that leads to an organization’s success. While operations professionals do not need to be senior executives, development of business acumen as applied to operations can help to bridge the gap between the organization’s senior leadership and the operations team. Business acumen as applied to operations works on multiple levels. In many organizations, operations is a service unit within the larger organization but it also serves the needs of the organization as a whole. The savvy operations person will look at operations within that context, applying the following skills to appropriately position operations and act with the best interests of the greater organization in mind. This also helps when trying to make the organization DevOps friendly.
Distilling the definition of business acumen for operations yields the following important skillsets:
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Understand the role of operations within the context of the organization to correctly position operations.
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Think broadly about decisions and act decisively.
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Support and promote change as needed.
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Develop basic business skills that allow operations to communicate within the executive suite.