“If it isn’t broken don’t fix it”
The first aim in operations is to get it functional. It is easy for anyone outside the system of your operations team to see ways to suggest improvements, and there is surely no upper limit when it comes to scope for improvement. The head of operations must be wary of these improvement suggestions that comes from the outside even though it seems logical. Don’t start of on implementing those changes straight away, file it for studying, and most essentially understand the parameters that will change on account of these changes and see if these will help in the overall functioning or not.
Improving the functioning of individual unit of processes must be attempted once the overall operations has reached a level of stability and is a working model. This is to avoid the common mistake of not knowing if a change has really affected the process in a positive way or not based on looking at limited data available from one segment of operations.
It is humanly impossible to plan everything on the drawing board, but still that is the best place to begin the process of improving operations. Listing out problem spots from all the stake holders in the process would be a good beginning. Get suggestions to improve it from others in the team. Have an independent person who has expertise in logical analysis to evaluate and make the initial priority of possibilities. Have a brainstorming session with key stakeholders, ensure that even the most ridiculous suggestions and opposition to suggestions are documented and not neglected.
Set up new data collection methods in parallel where it is possible to have unbiased flow of information to analyse the overall effect of changes in functioning and watch operations become more efficient.