Use when running, diagnosing, or designing internal business operations — 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).
Use when running, diagnosing, or designing internal business operations — 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 ≥ 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 — 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" — that's vendor-management, no question needed)?
Is the lane unambiguous from filenames mentioned (procurement-Q3.csv → procurement)?
If the codebase resolves the lane, route silently. Don't ask.
Step 2 — 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 — 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 → run that sub-skill in forked context → 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 — 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 — Return digest with cited canon challenge
When the sub-skill completes, return a ≤ 200-word digest to the parent thread:
What was analyzed
Top 3 findings (each anchored in a reference doc citation — 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 — 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 — 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 ≥ 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.) — 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 — every invocation is self-contained.
Does not call external APIs from Python tools (stdlib only, by design).
Distinct from
business-growth/* — that's the external sales motion (CSM, sales engineering, RevOps). BizOps is internal.
c-level-advisor/coo-advisor — that's strategic COO judgment ("should we restructure?"). BizOps is tactical ("here's the process map with bottlenecks").
engineering/slo-architect — that's system reliability with SLO/SLI/error budgets. process-mapper is business process reliability, not system reliability.
engineering/llm-wiki — 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)
❌ Run all 6 sub-skills "to be thorough" — pick one based on signal, return digest, let user chain
❌ Auto-approve a vendor or process change — surface findings; the human decides
❌ Edit production process docs without asking — write to a new file, propose the diff
❌ Skip the digest step — parent context needs ≤ 200-word digest, not the full sub-skill output
References
See c-level-advisor/coo-advisor for strategic COO framing
