Use when running, diagnosing, or designing internal business operations โ process documentation, vendor SLAs, capacity planning, internal comms, SOP/runbook authoring, procurement spend. Triggers on "BizOps review", "where's the bottleneck", "vendor health", "internal SOP", "all-hands deck", "spend categorization", "capacity for Q3", "process mapping". Forks context to route to one of six BizOps sub-skills (process-mapper, vendor-management, capacity-planner, internal-comms, knowledge-ops, procurement-optimizer) and returns a digest. Distinct from business-growth (external sales motion) and c-level-advisor (strategic, not operational).
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Use when running, diagnosing, or designing internal business operations โ process documentation, vendor SLAs, capacity planning, internal comms, SOP/runbook authoring, procurement spend. Triggers on "BizOps review", "where's the bottleneck", "vendor health", "internal SOP", "all-hands deck", "spend categorization", "capacity for Q3", "process mapping". Forks context to route to one of six BizOps sub-skills (process-mapper, vendor-management, capacity-planner, internal-comms, knowledge-ops, procurement-optimizer) and returns a digest. Distinct from business-growth (external sales motion) and c-level-advisor (strategic, not operational).
The BizOps surface is internal: how the company actually runs. This orchestrator forks its conversation context, routes your inquiry to one of six sub-skills, then returns a tight digest to the parent thread. The heavy ingestion (vendor catalogs, process interviews, multi-doc SOP intake) stays in the forked context.
When to invoke
Symptom
Sub-skill to route to
"Where does the work spend most of its time waiting?"
process-mapper
"Is this vendor delivering against the SLA?"
vendor-management
"Do we have enough people to ship in Q3?"
capacity-planner
"I need to brief the company on a re-org"
internal-comms
"Write me a runbook for the incident response process"
knowledge-ops
"Why is our software spend up 40% YoY?"
procurement-optimizer
Routing logic (deterministic)
The orchestrator classifies the inquiry by signals detected in the prompt. Two-signal threshold for confident routing; one-signal triggers a clarifying question.
Signal table
Signal class
Keywords
Sub-skill
PROCESS
bottleneck, cycle time, waiting, handoff, BPMN, process map, workflow
If signals are mixed (e.g., "vendor SLA + spend audit"), run the highest-confidence sub-skill first, then chain into the second one in a follow-up forked turn.
Fallback
If no signal class scores โฅ 2, ask one clarifying question naming the two most likely candidates. Do NOT guess silently.
Workflow (Matt Pocock grill discipline)
Derived from Matt Pocock's grill-with-docs pattern: explore-then-ask, one question per turn with a recommended answer, walk the decision tree depth-first, track dependencies, anchor every challenge in the documented canon (references/).
Step 1 โ Explore before asking
Before any clarifying question, check:
Does the user's working directory already contain a process map, vendor catalog, SOP, or org chart we can grep?
Does the inquiry already disambiguate the lane (e.g., "vendor SLA review" โ that's vendor-management, no question needed)?
Is the lane unambiguous from filenames mentioned (procurement-Q3.csv โ procurement)?
If the codebase resolves the lane, route silently. Don't ask.
Step 2 โ If still ambiguous, ONE forcing question with a recommended answer
Matt's rule: never bundle questions. Never default to "what do you think?". Always offer your recommendation.
Pattern:
Q1/1: [precise question naming the two candidate lanes]
Recommended: [Lane X, because <one-sentence rationale from the signal table>]
(Confirm, or override?)
Wait for the user's response. Then route. Never guess silently after a turn that asked a question.
Step 3 โ Forking decision-tree walk (only if the inquiry crosses lanes)
If the user's inquiry legitimately crosses two lanes (e.g., "vendor SLA + spend audit" = VENDOR + PROCUREMENT), walk the tree depth-first:
Resolve the higher-confidence lane first โ run that sub-skill in forked context โ return digest
Ask: "Should we now run [second lane]? My recommendation: yes, because [dependency reason]."
Only after explicit user confirmation, run the second sub-skill
Do NOT chain silently. Each fork is an explicit user-confirmed step.
Step 4 โ Invoke sub-skill in forked context
Each sub-skill is invoked with the original prompt + a digest of any structured inputs (file paths, JSON inputs). The fork keeps heavy ingestion (vendor catalog, process transcripts, SOP source documents) out of the parent context.
Step 5 โ Return digest with cited canon challenge
When the sub-skill completes, return a โค 200-word digest to the parent thread:
What was analyzed
Top 3 findings (each anchored in a reference doc citation โ e.g., "Goldratt's Theory of Constraints: optimize the bottleneck, not the non-constraint")
Top 3 next actions (named owners if possible)
Path to the artifact(s) produced
One grill challenge for the user, cited: "Your value-add ratio is 12%. Lean canon (Womack & Jones 1996) classifies <15% as waste-heavy. What's blocking process redesign โ political, technical, or budget?"
The parent agent can then ask follow-ups (each triggering new forked invocations).
When the user has provided enough context to enter a lane, the orchestrator may grill them on the decisions inside that lane before invoking the sub-skill. One question per turn, each with a recommended answer + canon citation. Examples:
PROCESS lane: "Before mapping: do you have measured cycle times per stage, or only estimates? Recommended: insist on measured data for the top-3 longest stages. Anti-pattern (Goldratt 1984): map estimates, optimize the wrong constraint."
VENDOR lane: "Before scoring: what's your tier-1 criticality threshold โ by spend ($X/year), or by operational dependency (revenue-blocking if vendor fails)? Recommended: operational dependency. Anti-pattern (Gartner TPRM): spend-only tiering misses critical low-spend vendors like the HVAC vendor in the Target breach."
CAPACITY lane: "Before modeling: are you planning for utilization or throughput? Recommended: throughput (Little's Law). Anti-pattern (DORA): planning for utilization > 80% destroys throughput via queueing."
Never run a sub-skill until the lane-defining decision is locked.
Assumptions
The user is acting on behalf of an organization with โฅ 10 employees (smaller orgs don't need this surface).
The user has access to the data the sub-skill needs (process docs, vendor list, spend export, etc.) โ or accepts the skill's templated dummy data.
The user wants deterministic, repeatable analysis over LLM-flavored prose. Every sub-skill ships stdlib-only Python tools.
Non-goals
Not a substitute for an ERP, vendor management platform (Vendr, Tropic), or capacity-planning SaaS (Float, Runn).
Does not store state across sessions โ every invocation is self-contained.
Does not call external APIs from Python tools (stdlib only, by design).
Distinct from
business-growth/* โ that's the external sales motion (CSM, sales engineering, RevOps). BizOps is internal.
c-level-advisor/coo-advisor โ that's strategic COO judgment ("should we restructure?"). BizOps is tactical ("here's the process map with bottlenecks").
engineering/slo-architect โ that's system reliability with SLO/SLI/error budgets. process-mapper is business process reliability, not system reliability.
engineering/llm-wiki โ that's a personal PKM (Karpathy's pattern). knowledge-ops is company-wide SOP authoring.
Output artifacts
Every sub-skill produces at least one artifact (markdown, CSV, or JSON) saved to the user's working directory. The orchestrator surfaces the file path in the digest.
Anti-patterns (do not)
โ Run all 6 sub-skills "to be thorough" โ pick one based on signal, return digest, let user chain
โ Auto-approve a vendor or process change โ surface findings; the human decides
โ Edit production process docs without asking โ write to a new file, propose the diff
โ Skip the digest step โ parent context needs โค 200-word digest, not the full sub-skill output
References
See c-level-advisor/coo-advisor for strategic COO framing
