Operations Management
Run a company's operation from its inbox. Every email lands on a live operating line (capacity, queues, quality and cash): find the bottleneck, keep the promise, and watch each call show up in throughput and lead time.
Inside The Operator
Screens from a class in progress. Click any screen to see it full size.
The Operator is the platform's operations-management sim, run as a continuous in-tray. Instead of one big strategic call per week, you live in an inbox: every active day brings 1-5 emails from your COO, CFO, head of customer success or a supplier, the same emails for every team in the class on the same day. Most offer three or four options; the rest ask you to draft a real written response that an LLM grades 0-10 on decisiveness, reasoning quality, and operational realism. Under the inbox runs your company's operating line: three steps that move the one thing it sells (Halo's customer requests through Sales, Onboarding and Support; Field Atlas's orders through Supplier, Warehouse and Shipping; Crestview's covers through Host, Kitchen and Service), each with a daily capacity. Work not done today waits for tomorrow, lead time is work in the line divided by daily output (Little's Law), part of what is delivered comes back later as rework, and revenue and cash follow what the line delivers; below zero cash, forced cuts land. All but one of each day's emails (two of three on a standard day) are calls that act on the line, and some calls bring a follow-up email days later. Teams are ranked on the Operator Score: 60% Call Quality (each answer graded against the options the team actually had, across customer health, team morale, brand and operations) + 40% Operating Results (on time against the company's promise, throughput, and cash health), the one number on the leaderboard, final report and gradebook. Every five operating days each team gets an operations review; professors see each team's arc over the season and can send one scripted shock to every team at once. Students can take one of four light roles tied to the line (Operations Lead, Service Lead, Supply & Quality Lead, People Lead): the inbox marks the emails each role owns, every student writes a short weekly reflection on the bottleneck and what they did about it, and once a class uses roles, role work is 20% of the suggested grade. Professors control which days of the week are active, how many emails arrive per active day, and the response window.
Share this with your team— printable one-pager for a chair or procurement./for-your-team/the-operatorEmails from the whole catalog land from Day 1, the same ones for every team. Teams read their company profile and its three-step line, claim their roles (each owns some emails and a step of the line), and learn to read the operations board: which step is the bottleneck, and what an unanswered email does to it the next morning.
The first weekly operations review arrives: output, lead time, backlog, the bottleneck, quality and money, with what moved each, and each student writes a first reflection on the bottleneck. Teams see a queue carry over and learn where capacity actually raises output.
Calls made earlier start coming back: defects as rework at the bottleneck, and follow-up emails scheduled by last week's choices. Teams weigh prevention against absorbing, and spending against cash.
A class-wide shock (a storm, an outage, a demand surge) can hit every team on the same day. Teams that left slack at the bottleneck recover faster; the recovery table compares every team on the same hit.
Every graded call stays in Call Quality and every day stays in Operating Results to the end. The leaderboard, final report and gradebook show the same Operator Score, and the debrief walks each team's operations arc.
A walkthrough from Jeff Forgrave, who built Boardroom Rivals.
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