Decoded: Operations

An SLA, or service level agreement, is a written commitment between a provider and a customer that defines how a service will perform, using measurable targets like uptime, response time or delivery time. It also spells out how performance is measured and what the customer gets, often a credit or refund, when the provider misses the target.

Lean is a management approach that focuses on delivering what the customer values while removing waste: anything that takes time, money or effort without adding value. It grew out of the Toyota Production System in Japan and is now used in factories, hospitals, offices and software teams to improve processes step by step.

A bottleneck is the step in a process with the least capacity, the point where work piles up and waits. Because everything has to pass through it, the bottleneck sets the speed of the whole system. Improving any other step barely helps until the bottleneck itself is fixed.

An OKR, short for objectives and key results, is a goal-setting method that pairs one clear, ambitious objective with a few measurable key results showing whether it was achieved. Teams usually set OKRs every quarter, share them openly, and score them at the end to learn what worked.

A stakeholder is any person or group who can affect a project, decision or business, or who is affected by it. That includes obvious players like owners, managers, customers and employees, but also suppliers, regulators, local communities and other teams whose work depends on the result.

A KPI, or key performance indicator, is a measurable value that shows how well a team, process or company is doing against an important goal. It is chosen on purpose, tracked regularly and compared to a target, so people can see quickly whether they are on track and act when they are not.