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Scaling Business Operations: Systems, Processes, Teams
2,939 students
Scaling Business Operations: Systems, Processes, Teams
scaling operations | chief operating officer | business process management | org design | workforce planning | coo role
Last updated 10/2026
English
English [Auto],
What you'll learn
- Recognise which management habits stop working at which company size
- Describe a process in BPMN so the handoffs become visible
- Introduce an operations function and define what it actually owns
- Find where capacity is lost: bottlenecks, queues, idle time, context switching
- Design operating rhythms that produce decisions rather than status updates
- Choose an organisational structure using design drivers rather than preference
- Forecast demand and run a gap analysis between need and available capacity
- Run the transition to a new structure without stopping the work
- Learn alongside Mike's 1.6 million students from 185 countries
- Get the author's experience from Preply, Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank
Explore related topics
Course content
15 sections • 40 lectures • 23h 9m total length
Requirements
- A company or function that has grown faster than its processes
- No prior operations background required. Everything is built from the beginning
- Access to your org chart and whatever process documentation exists
- English at intermediate level or above, since all lessons are in English
- Willingness to write down how work actually flows, not how it is supposed to
Description
This course contains the use of artificial intelligence.
Companies do not break during growth because there is more work. They break because the way of running thirty people stops working at a hundred and fifty, and nobody notices the day it stopped.
What that looks like from inside
Decisions that used to happen in a corridor now need a meeting. Something that one person held in their head is now four people's job and nobody owns the seams. Output stops rising in proportion to headcount, so more people get hired, which makes the coordination problem worse. Everyone is working harder and the company is slower. I have been in a company that doubled twice and the second doubling was much worse than the first, because we scaled the team and not the way it was run.
What this course actually covers
Five blocks, in the order things break. First, ten lessons from the operating seat: the role, strategy, culture as a delivery instrument, the goal system, processes, structure, projects, finances, infrastructure and people management — the whole surface of running a company operationally. Second, describing processes properly: methodology, BPMN, tooling, worked examples and how to run a mapping project. Third, the operations function itself — why it appears once a company passes fifty people, input-output-outcome metrics, bottlenecks, queues, context switching, and the operating rhythms that keep teams synchronised. Fourth, the shape of the organisation: the six design drivers, matrix structures, the leadership cascade, span of control, and running the transition without stopping the work. Fifth, capacity: demand forecasting, workload norming, gap analysis and optimisation.
A note on the material
Some lessons inside the operating and capacity blocks deal with hiring, onboarding and headcount. That is not a detour — in a company built on knowledge work, capacity is people, and the operating layer is where headcount decisions actually get made. The frameworks throughout are general: BPMN, the design drivers, span of control, gap analysis and full-time equivalent arithmetic behave the same in any industry.
Who is teaching this
I am Mike. I built the people system at Preply as it became a unicorn, through exactly this kind of growth, and I have worked at Wargaming, iDeals and Alfa-Bank. More than 1.6 million students have enrolled in my courses across 185 countries, and over 150,000 specialists have gone through my programmes. I hold PHRi and SHRM-CP certifications and represent HRCI in more than ten countries.
What is included
Lifetime access to all 38 lessons
Active instructor support in the Q&A section
A Udemy Certificate of Completion
Working material: the operational efficiency checklist, BPMN mapping, the metric hierarchy, the six design drivers, span of control, demand forecasting and gap analysis
Real organisational cases, including Wargaming and ArcelorMittal
Where to start
Name one decision that used to take a conversation and now takes a meeting. That is the first place your operating model stopped fitting the company. Enrol now and start today.
Who this course is for:
- Founders whose company outgrew the way it was originally run
- Operations leaders introducing structure into a fast-growing business
- Executives who added people and did not get proportionally more output
- Managers asked to build an operations function from nothing
- Chiefs of staff and general managers who own how the company runs
- Function heads whose processes were designed for a smaller company
- Anyone whose answer to growth so far has been hiring more people