About

Most firms bring one kind of engineer. A business needs two.

We build systems that are not allowed to fail, and we design the organizations that run on them.

Book a 20‑minute call Take the Operational Assessment

How the work is staffed

Every business is two systems wearing one coat.

There is the technical system: the network, the servers, identity, data, the applications. In the language systems engineers use, that is a hard system: the goal is agreed, the behavior is measurable, and it yields directly to engineering. And there is the human system, a soft system in the same literature: who decides, who hands off to whom, what people actually do when the documented process is inconvenient, and whether a change survives its first bad week. A soft system does not yield to the same kind of fix, because the first problem is agreeing what the problem even is.

Improve either one on its own and you usually degrade the whole thing. Automate a process nobody agreed to and people route around it. Redesign a workflow the infrastructure cannot carry and it fails on a Tuesday. This is not a new observation. It has a research literature going back to the 1950s and a name, sociotechnical systems, but it is almost never how the work is actually staffed.

Nearly every firm in this market brings an infrastructure engineer and calls the rest change management. We engineer both.

Principal

Mark Champion, MCSE

Infrastructure, security and technology architecture, at institutional and enterprise scale. Nothing fails in isolation.

In his words

I’ve built enough infrastructure that wasn’t allowed to fail to know the pattern on sight. Eventually I realized the networks weren’t the only systems that needed architecture.

What I kept noticing was that the network was rarely the actual problem.

I would be called in because something technical was broken, and I would find a business where information had to cross four departments to answer one question, where two teams maintained the same list, where a process existed because somebody had set it up that way in 2011 and nobody had revisited it since. The technology was doing exactly what it had been asked to do. The organization around it had never been designed.

A business is a system. It has dependencies, traffic, failure points and capacity, the same as any network, and it can be architected the same way. That is the work I do now: the whole operating system of a company, designed as one thing rather than assembled by accident.

Credentials

MCSE · Microsoft
Security+ · CompTIA
Network+ · CompTIA
A+ · CompTIA
Project+ · CompTIA
Fiber optic installation and termination

Education

UNC Charlotte, Engineering
Duke University, Business Intelligence

Standing

Every level of government: local, state and federal. Procurement that has to be defensible, records that have to be retained, and constraints that are not open to negotiation.
Keynote speaker at industry events, functions and universities.
Published author: Working Your Network, Vol. 1: Managing Technology, From Survival to Success.
Expert witness and forensic consultant, in multiple court cases, several of them high-profile.

Past clients

Some of the organizations that have hired me. In most cases it was for something they didn’t have in-house.

Government: United States Postal Service · additional agencies across local, state and federal government
Healthcare: Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist · Western Carolina Medical Society · hospitals and private practices across the region
Education: UNC Greensboro · North Carolina A&T State University · Wake Forest University · East Carolina University
Arts & nonprofit: Winston-Salem Symphony · Greensboro Symphony · Raleigh Symphony Orchestra · Habitat for Humanity
Business: IBM · American Express · Coca-Cola · Pepsi · Deere-Hitachi · Highland Brewing Company · hospitality · accounting and law firms

Principal

Jennifer Bailey, MS

Industrial-organizational psychology, applied in regulated care, finance and public institutions. Broken systems are a people problem first.

In her words

I ran the operation before I studied why operations fail. Staffing, scheduling, budgets and full regulatory accountability inside a licensed care organization, where a missed handoff was never just an inconvenience. It was somebody’s family.

What I kept noticing, there and in every organization since, is that a “broken system” is almost never actually broken. The software runs. The process is written down somewhere. What has actually gone wrong is a person: an owner nobody named, an incentive nobody aligned, a decision two people each think they made, a change somebody is quietly resisting and nobody will say so out loud.

I was later brought in to help turn around an organization that had lost its footing. Nothing was technically broken. What had failed was who was accountable for what, and whether anyone had actually agreed on how decisions got made. Fix that, and the operation fixes itself.

I’m QuickBooks certified, and certified by Intuit in bookkeeping and in tax at Level 1. In a small company the books are where financial information actually flows: what got billed, what got paid, what a job really cost. When the books are a mess it’s rarely an accounting problem. It’s an information-flow problem. I also handle every conversation our clients’ CPAs and attorneys need to have with us.

Screwed-up systems come from people. Not from bad software, and not from bad intentions: from roles, incentives and handoffs nobody designed on purpose. You don’t fix a soft system by patching the hardware. You design it, with the same rigor and the same evidence base as anything else that has to hold under load.

Credentials

M.S. Psychology
QuickBooks Certified
Intuit Bookkeeping
Intuit Tax Level 1

On an engagement

Work and job design · organizational development and change · training design and evaluation · onboarding and socialization · conflict resolution and negotiation · small-business books, tax preparation, and coordination with CPAs and attorneys.

Standing

M.S. Psychology: the practising credential in industrial-organizational psychology, and the discipline three of the assessment’s five domains come from.
Operational leadership across regulated care, finance and public institutions: three industries with almost nothing in common except the way organizations fail.
Current board and committee service: a regional foundation board and a community steering committee.

What the discipline is

Industrial-organizational psychology is the scientific study of how people behave at work: how jobs should be designed, how teams coordinate, why some changes take and others quietly reverse, and what makes a workplace productive rather than merely busy. Most of what is reliably known about onboarding, about training that actually transfers to the job, and about organizational change came out of this field.

On an engagement it covers the people side of the map. Job and work design. Role clarity and who owns a handoff. Organizational socialization, what most firms call onboarding, done as something other than a folder of PDFs. Training needs analysis, and whether the training took. Performance management and employee relations. Conflict resolution and negotiation. And organizational climate: whether this is a place where good work is possible at all.

Adoption is what decides whether the rest holds. An operating system nobody adopts is a document with a server bill attached.

Where the accountability sat

Roles where the operation was mine to run, and the consequences of getting it wrong were not abstract.

Regulated care: A licensed facility under state oversight: staffing, budgets, care standards and regulatory compliance, inspected without notice, with no version of the job where any of it is allowed to slip.
Finance: An operation losing money and direction: reporting rebuilt so leadership could see what was actually happening, accountability reassigned, and the finances turned around.
Technology delivery: A global technology initiative brought in at roughly half its original quote: contractor hired, scoped and managed to completion.
Public institutions: Programs designed and launched, participation grown, an underused service made visible again in its own community.
Small-business books: Bookkeeping, tax preparation and coordination with CPAs and attorneys.

Why the assessment asks what it asks

Three of the five domains are questions about people.

The Operational Assessment scores five domains: People and Handoffs, Processes, Systems and Tools, Information Flow, and Change Readiness. Only one of those is straightforwardly a technology question.

Change Readiness carries real weight in the index and is reported first among the weaknesses, because it is the strongest single predictor of whether anything else we build is still working a year later. A business that cannot absorb change does not have a technology problem to solve first.

Those questions come out of industrial-organizational psychology. That is why they are in the index, and why the score means something.

Take the assessment: three minutes, and the result is yours before you give us anything

The principle

We’re not consultants. We’re in this with you.

We don’t deliver recommendations and walk away. We stay accountable for the system we build.

Consulting has a structural problem: the work ends at the document, and the risk transfers back to the client at exactly the moment the hard part begins. Whether the recommendations survive contact with reality is somebody else’s problem.

We don’t want that arrangement. If the operation succeeds, OpsWorq succeeds. If the implementation fails, that is ours to carry. It is a harder way to run a firm and it is the only version of this we are interested in doing.

The people who design your system are the people who run it. In most of this industry the person who works out what you need and the person who answers the ticket are different teams who have never spoken. You won’t be handed to somebody who has to be brought up to speed.

Who this is for

OpsWorq is for companies that want to get better.

That’s a real filter, not a pleasantry. If you want someone to keep the computers running and change nothing else, that’s our managed IT team at opsworq.net, a complete offer with no minimum company size. The one thing we can’t design around is a business that won’t change anything. Everything else is workable.

Why this exists

The tooling, and the job.

People think we’re good network engineers, that we build solid networks and good operations. We are. That’s the tooling, not the job. Our job is to make our clients rich.

No client of ours has gone out of business over an operational failure we were responsible for.

That’s also the standard behind every engagement here: we only take work we believe we can win.