Operations and infrastructure relate to the internal workings of your project or your organisation. It is the way in which people, systems and processes all work and interact together (given a set of external inputs) to deliver your project’s outputs and outcomes. As your idea turns into a full and working project or organisation, you will need to think about formally mapping out your operational needs. This guide looks at how to build the various components of your organisation and operations.

The following diagram sets out the broad framework for building your business model that is covered in our other guides (in particular see the social model and the business model guides):

Operational mapping will require you to start understanding the details of the activities that you will need to carry out (on a day to day basis) to deliver the interventions, outputs and outcomes that you have defined as part of your social model and strategy. We recommend you take a look at our social model theory of action guide as this is very much aligned with the process of developing your key activities. The activities you define will be unique to your organisation; here are some typical, generic examples:

• Production / manufacture
• Service / product delivery
• Promoting your offer (sales, marketing)
• Managing suppliers / supply chain
• Monitoring and evaluation
• Networking
• Fundraising / investor dialogue
• Financial management

For each of the operational activities you define, start to think more deeply about how it will actually work in practice; the operational mapping template will enable you to document the following aspects of each component:

• Purpose / objective of activity: how do you define success for this activity? Think broadly about the various aspects of delivering this activity that would enable success and include them in your definition.
• Key steps / actions: what are the headline (max. five) actions, which, in aggregate, would define how this activity takes, place from day to day? This will be the initial step in developing an operational manual further down the line; but at this stage, the purpose is to enable you to think clearly and comprehensively about the underlying mechanics of your project.
• Capabilities / skills / knowledge required: what human expertise is required to deliver the activity successfully? These may or may not be the same as your own areas of expertise – this is an important first step in working out where you will need the support of others. This is discussed further below.
• Key inputs: what other things need to happen for this activity to be successful?

Here, you are trying to define the inter-relationships between your activities – within a single organisation, the success of any single activity will usually be dependent on one or more ‘upstream’ activities, as well as on external inputs. For example, successful marketing would probably be a key input to your sales activity; and successful product delivery is likely to be influenced by a robust manufacturing operation, which in turn will require a reliable, external (ethical) supply chain to deliver raw materials on time.

As discussed above, the process of mapping out your operations will enable you to start to think about what human expertise you need within your organisation. This expertise can take many forms, all of which reside inside people’s heads: skills, capabilities, knowledge and experience – let us refer to them collectively as skills.

Having identified which skills you need in the mapping exercise above, it is likely that you will ‘tick the box’ on some of them; for the rest, it is worth starting to think about how you will fill the gap. For each skills gap you identify, work through the following issues:

• How important is the skill to the success of the overall activity? Give a simple overall rating on importance (high, medium, low)
• How well could you learn this skill as you go along?
• Do I know someone/can I find someone who has the right skills and will be willing to give me some advice/guidance?
• Can I find third parties who have this skill and who might want to work in partnership?
• Can I buy in this skill from a third party reliably and affordably?
• Use this process to help you identify potential solutions to filling your skills gaps. There are a few words of advice here

As a social entrepreneur at the early stages of set up, you are likely to have a limited budget and will not have an established track record yet. As such, it is advisable to take an open-minded approach to assessing which skills you think you could learn on the job or through self-tuition. The role of the entrepreneur is often diverse and broad at the early stages. This will give you an opportunity to refine your business and your operating model. In areas such as sales and marketing, it is your vision and the way you communicate that which are likely to be most important at this stage anyway. One area that social entrepreneurs often shy away from is financial management of the organisation. It is highly recommended that you commit to developing a minimum level of financial management skills and understanding, and actively use this to manage your organisation’s finances at the very early stages.

You will notice that the final obvious question is absent here. That is, if the skill is essential and no other options exist, does this mean you need to recruit someone into the organisation? This may, ultimately be the right way forward if you identify a group of essential skills gaps that naturally fit together into a single role within your organisation and a realistic profile for someone to have. But remember that you are just starting out here, and bringing an employee onto your books at this stage may be a high-risk approach. What often happens is that you may be able to find an ‘entrepreneurial partner’ who buys in to your vision, mission and values, has key skills that complement your own, and is motivated to join your project. In many cases, entrepreneurial partnerships will split their formal organisational responsibilities between internal operations-focused areas versus strategy / business development / sales, reflecting a common division of skills and interests; however, in reality their work will overlap regularly in the early stages.