Operations

• Helpful governing docs that have been reviewed by an attorney!
• Concise information on hiring, taxes, and visas in different countries for nonprofits
• Nonprofit software discounts
• Template for a financial tracking spreadsheet and an employee handbook
• Onboarding/Offboarding procedures

Impact Ops is an “experienced, independent, and EA-aligned team focused on delivering ops services where they’re needed most. [Their] professional qualifications include project management and data protection.”

Resources to strengthen your nonprofit financial management

“Operations Nation is a “community-powered knowledge hub for operations leaders”

The list is Workstream Business Systems’ Reading List for their EA Operations Fellowship. It covers:

• Strategic Organizational Foundations
• Strategies for Growth: People, Projects, and Productivity
• Growing Your Impact

Includes Categories such as:

• Business Creation
• Value-Creation & Testing
• Marketing
• Sales
• Value-Delivery
• Finance & Accounting

Taken from A list of EA-relevant business books I've read - Category “Operations/Get Shit Done:”

Top List:

• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement
• The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win
• Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Work & Flow

Almost made the cut:

• Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters
• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

Also see this one on operations management!

In the comments, you can find a list of recommended resources: ”As an undergrad liberal arts major, it was only in the last 2.5 years that I grew to love the intellectual depth (and fun) of operations research/ops-oriented economic analysis, and project management practices and courses. To pick two examples addressing food insecurity, there's this work by an economist and this work by operations research faculty. It could be worth pulling together an informal Google Doc syllabus — akin to AI safety syllabi like this — including resources from:

• HBS Management readings
• INFORMS case studies
• INSEAD, MIT Sloan Ops Mgmt, and Princeton ORFE papers and primers (among others)
• PMI's PMBOK® and other, free materials

A more-digestible entry point is The Everything Store on Amazon, which highlights how Bezos recruited a number of ORFE and Sloan alumni to make logistics and operations AMZN's core competency. See notable alumni here, this  Jeff Wilke video, and this excerpt from the book for an example of the heated operational debates within Amazon during its first decade, which could be good food for thought for distributed EA organizations.”

At a management offsite in the late 1990s, a team of well-intentioned junior executives stood up before the company’s top brass and gave a presentation on a problem indigenous to all large organizations: the difficulty of coordinating far-flung divisions.

The junior executives recommended a variety of different techniques to foster cross-group dialogue and afterward seemed proud of their own ingenuity. Then Jeff Bezos, his face red and the blood vessel in his forehead pulsing, spoke up. “I understand what you’re saying, but you are completely wrong, ” he said.

“Communication is a sign of dysfunction. It means people aren’t working together in a close, organic way. We should be trying to figure out a way for teams to communicate less with each other, not more.”

...At that meeting and in public speeches afterward, Bezos vowed to run Amazon with an emphasis on decentralization and independent decision-making.

“A hierarchy isn’t responsive enough to change, ” he said. “I’m still trying to get people to do occasionally what I ask. And if I was successful, maybe we wouldn’t have the right kind of company.”

Bezos’s counterintuitive point was that coordination among employees wasted time, and that the people closest to problems were usually in the best position to solve them. That would come to represent something akin to the conventional wisdom in the high-tech industry over the next decade.

The companies that embraced this philosophy, like Google, Amazon, and, later, Facebook, were in part drawing lessons from theories about lean and agile software development. In the seminal high-tech book The Mythical Man-Month, IBM veteran and computer science professor Frederick Brooks argued that adding manpower to complex software projects actually delayed progress.

One reason was that the time and money spent on communication increased in proportion to the number of people on a project.

“This is a sequence, based on the US Army Field Manual 7-0, Training. As I do this in my full-time work, I'll be breaking down how organizations can take some lessons from the Army and how it conducts long-term business. Hopefully, this will all be of use to you in how you plan for your organization. I'll be addressing the contents of the FM in order, following along with how it addresses things.”