[Assignment] — A Quick Rundown on Operations Management.

1. What is Operations Management and how is it used to improve the performance of the organization?
2. How are the Decision Making Criteria “Under Risk” and “Under Uncertainty” used? Provide example

[Deliverable #1] Successful organizations coalesce behind sound leadership and attainable goals. And Operations Management is leveraged by leadership to achieve the aforenoted precepts. For an organization to be successful (with few exceptions), it must produce net-positive line-items and remain aligned to its vision, culture, and goals. In turn, successfully leveraging organizational management mitigates the nuances many struggling businesses face, such as brooding a dysfunctional workman-fellowship role. In effect, successfully executing operations management minimizes many nuanced business idiosyncrasies within a dysfunctional workforce, such as reducing the net effects of corporate malfeasance, leadership lacking a positive followership role with the workman, and the stymied intraoffice-throughput between communication-dependant departments/SBUs, etc[1].

[Deliverable #2] As with everything and more so within corporate management, every decision made is inherently beholden to certainty, risk, and uncertainty. Though seemingly similar words, ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’ both have caveats that impact a decision-maker's overall assessment. Risk is the imperfect knowledge — or presumption of market (or scenario) participant irrationality. Whereas imperfect knowledge — a commonality in decision-making and macroeconomics — occurs when both the buyer and seller (or decision-maker / decision-receiver) do not have all the necessary information to excise a 100% certain outcome. Of course, with death and taxes as the exception, most things in life are not ‘100%’ certain; therefore, one must assume both the risk involved and any uncertainty constraints in the decision-making process.[2]

When a decision is considered ‘certain,’ then the aggregated and inherited causality in the decision-making process is known. The results are predictable and have high degrees of actuality or a ‘certain’ outcome. This is a rare event and usually occurs in perfect economic markets. Transversely, the risk is the ‘assumed’, or known occurrences consistent with a certain probability for a specific outcome. For example, a person who gambles their money assumes the risk of a losing outcome of 1 in 2.922e8 odds in accordance to the current Powerball Jackpot odds (June, 2022). Furthermore, there is a high degree of uncertainty when purchasing Powerball tickets, because the probability of winning is also derived from the number of active participants in the lottery — which is an otherwise unknown variable to the gambler.

Sources:

[1] HBR: Operations Strategy: https://hbr.org/topic/operations-strategy

[2] HBR: Strategy Under Uncertainty: https://hbr.org/1997/11/strategy-under-uncertainty