The Operations Director owns the delivery side of ALSA. You oversee the Development Officers, Academic Officers, Mentoring Officers, Engagement Officers, and Operations Interns, set the programme calendar, and ensure that what the organisation promises to members actually gets done. This is the role for someone who gets satisfaction from watching a plan execute cleanly.
What You Will Do
- Set the semester operations calendar in consultation with cabinet. This covers professional development events, workshops, and community initiatives. Every officer in your portfolio should know what they are delivering and when before the semester begins.
- Manage the Development Officers, Academic Officers, Mentoring Officers, and Engagement Officers. Set their priorities, review their work, and unblock them when they are stuck. Their outcomes are your accountability.
- Oversee the Operations Interns and ensure each one has clear direction from the relevant officer. Interns cannot do useful work without a clear brief. If they are idle, that is a management problem, not an intern problem.
- Represent the operations portfolio at cabinet meetings. Come prepared with progress updates, risks, and decisions that need cabinet input. Cabinet cannot help with problems they do not know about.
- Coordinate with the Marketing Director to ensure every event is promoted with sufficient lead time. No event should go live without promotion already scheduled. Build this expectation into every event handover.
- Conduct mid-semester check-ins with each member of the operations team. Catch problems while they are still small. A check-in takes thirty minutes. A team crisis takes a week.
- Own post-event debriefs and ensure learnings are captured for future semesters. What worked, what did not, and what the next Operations Director should do differently. These notes are the institutional memory of the portfolio.
- Identify gaps in ALSA's programme offering and bring proposals to cabinet. Your vantage point across the full operations team means you will see these gaps before anyone else does.
- Update the comprehensive handover document at the end of your tenure. The incoming Operations Director should be able to understand the portfolio, the team, and the priorities without needing to reconstruct them from scratch.
What We Expect
- Time commitment: Roughly 8–12 hours per week; expect more in event weeks
- Meetings: Chair the weekly operations team meeting and attend the weekly cabinet meeting. Once a month, the operations team meeting is replaced by a full-team session where every portfolio and cabinet come together.
- Calendar: Operations calendar set and shared with cabinet before the semester begins
- Team: Development Officers, Academic Officers, Mentoring Officers, Engagement Officers, and Operations Interns should never be waiting on you for direction or feedback
- Cabinet: Attend all cabinet meetings prepared to report on the operations portfolio
- Quality: Events should consistently meet the standard set in the programme plan
- Documentation: Post-event debriefs submitted within one week of each event
What Success Looks Like
By end of semester, every planned event has been delivered, the operations team has functioned without needing cabinet to intervene, and there is a clear record of what worked and what did not for the next Director to build on.
Current
Cayla Huang