Welcome to OpenOps!

This site is a living knowledge base built to promote best practices, streamline operations, and foster a culture of continuous improvement. Whether you’re onboarding new team members, refining your project management approach, or seeking guidance on workplace policies, you’ll find clear, actionable resources to help you and your team succeed.

The collection includes a spread of management and business process documentation that I've been using for many years in various roles across a multitude of team sizes and organisations. These are mostly management level documents, but many are also more than accessible for team leads or seniors.

The content spans a wide range of topics, including technical know-how, people management, project planning, policies, and finance, ensuring you have practical tools and insights at your fingertips.

Some of these were pages created specifically for in-house documentation (Notion company wiki), others as email templates (day 1 onboarding/welcome), while others were originally presentations that have been expanded to be more readable. There will also be links to spreadsheets that I've created and refined over many years.

Many of these documents will be usable as is, others might need some adjustment to make them a better fit for you and your particular use case and organisation. Either way, they are all available under CC BY-SA 4.0.

All Documents by Section

People Management

Getting Time Off
Details on getting time off from work.

Getting Started
Welcome email for new staff on day one.

Mental Health

Mastering the Art of Spoons, Forks, and Orange Cups
A talk on mental health, providing tools to understand and deal with our ability and capacity to deal with life.

Mentorship Framework

1:1 Mentorship Framework
A framework for facilitating meaningful dialogue for 1:1 mentorship relationships.

Peer Reviews

Peer Review Example Documents
Example documents for use in the peer review process.

Peer Review Framework
A structured framework to assist with employee reviews, encompassing self reflection and meaningful feedback from their peers.

Communication

Slack Etiquette
General guidelines for effective Slack usage.

Managing Up
Understanding and unlocking the layers of effective management in both directions.

Working With Documents

Working With Documents
A Working With... document outlines the key areas of expectation around working with each individual within a team.

Working With... Example
An example of a Working With... document.

Project Management

The Six Hour Day
Motivation to plan for no more than six billable hours per day for developers.

Time Management
Effective time management within the work day.

Sprint Calculator
A spreadsheet to aid sprint calculations for fixed bid software projects.

Sprint Planning Strategies
Outlines for effective sprint planning strategies.

Sprint Plan for Development
Considerations for effective sprint planning for software development projects.

Technical

Digital Security
Key considerations and guidelines to effectively manage and maintain a high level of digital security.

macOS 101
Using a Mac for the first time, or need a refresher on some basics to get you up and running quickly? Well, then you’ve come to the right place!

Useful Software
This is a list of tools every developer should have installed on their work computer, and many that most non-devs should have too.

Digital Assets

ffmpeg Basics
A starting point to get the most out of ffmpeg to convert and transcode video formats and image sequences.

Asset Creation Guidelines
Guidelines for digital asset creation for use in Unity.

Development

Build Notes Template
A template to use for generating build notes for deliverables to clients and external stakeholders.

Build Notes Example
An example of build notes for deliverables to clients and external stakeholders.

Pull Request Templates
Examples of pull request templates.

Build Number Guidelines
An example of build notes for deliverables to clients and external stakeholders.

Travel

Travel 101
A collection of high-level thoughts on maximising travel preparation.

Packing List
Basic packing list of items to cover most work trips.

On-Site Survival Guide
An outline of what to expect when installing projects on site, and how to prepare and plan for them.