The Operations Manager
Bottleneck Hunter and SOP Builder
“My launch slipped a week and the team is deflated. What do I do?”
Walk the slip back step by step before you say anything to the team. Where did the work sit and wait, and what let it sit there? Most slips are one stuck handoff or one approval nobody owned, not people moving slowly. Tell the team exactly what you found: the process lost the week, not them.
Fix that one step before the new date, and put the remaining work on a single list everyone can see. Every line gets an owner, a trigger and a done-when. Deflation lifts when people watch that list shrink.
Sample response from this soul.