The realities of an operations strategy

,Any operations strategy requires considerable time and effort and senior management will need to be involved for at least part of their time. This could possibly vary from four to 18 months. An effective operations strategy helps the organization to compete more effectively.
An organization’s technology strategy shapes the integration between different parts of its processes, for example. The planning and control strategy has to work within the constraints imposed by technology. A formally constructed operations strategy gives the basic structure which ensures that decisions taken in the organization all point in the same direction.
The obvious difficulties is that operations managers operate in real time and can only allow their attention to drift from the running of the operation for relatively short periods. This day-to-day running of the operation will result in operating under a “need to deliver” allowing the most important pressures to divert them. The inertia of operational resources will also unfortunately impose a degree of conservatism on whoever manages them.
No operations manager will or can change operational direction unnecessarily which could retard imaginative strategic change.