Stories
The mechanics of how organizations work, change, and improve.
An organization gets much easier to change once you can see how its work actually moves. I follow the work from start to finish, find the seam where the design gave way, and build the smallest system that lets the improvement hold.
Managing Director, Revuity Systems
Jay Burgess
Operations, from a different angle.
I come to operations with forward deployed engineering, data science and analytics in hand, which changes the first question I ask. Instead of looking for who dropped the ball, I look at how the work is designed to move, and at what it would take for it to move better.
More about how I workOperational systems
Designing how work becomes business performance.
The arrangement of people, workflows, decisions, data and technology that turns effort into finished work. When the arrangement is off, the loss tends to hide in waiting, rework, delay and capacity nobody’s using, and that’s exactly where the economics start to move.
Throughput, conversion and responsiveness all improve once work can travel through the organization without stopping so often.
Manual handling, rework, duplicate effort and unnecessary software all shrink once the arrangement underneath them is fixed rather than tooled around.
More work gets finished without headcount rising to match it, and over time that’s the only durable way those two numbers pull apart.
The people and technology already in place get more done, and you don’t have to add more of either.
Now
What I’m working on
Current focus
01
Building Revuity Systems
02
Delivering operational systems, reaching for forward-deployed engineering, software, data science or AI when the work calls for it
03
Studying how operational systems shape organizations
04
See what I’m working on now Writing about systems, work, software, data, and AI
Ideas
Ideas I work on
Operational Systems
How organizations turn people, workflows, decisions, data, and technology into actual work.
Forward Deployed Engineering
A delivery method within operational systems work: how a diagnostic becomes a deployed system with a measurable outcome.
Making Work Work
A practical philosophy for removing friction between people, process, technology, and the work itself.
Organizations & Technology
How software, data, automation, and AI change the way organizations operate.
Principles
How I work
Start with the operation, not the software.
Watch how the work actually moves before deciding what it needs.
Friction is a systems signal.
Wherever people improvise, re-enter data or keep a private record, that’s where the design gave out.
Deployment changes the problem.
Real work running through a system turns up requirements no interview ever would.
Technology is a component, not the objective.
Tools carry leverage, and the purpose has to come from the operation.
The outcome is the unit of delivery.
The work’s finished when the operating number moves and stays there without anyone watching it.
Important work should not fight the systems around it.
Less of the day spent on coordination the design ought to have absorbed.
Featured essays
Essays
Selected work
Systems in production
Notebook
From the Notebook
The org chart is not the routing map
Nobody escalates up the chart, they escalate to whoever answered last time. Trace those paths and you’ll have the real structure, including the people who are load bearing and don’t know it.
All field notesEvery private spreadsheet is a specification
Somebody wrote it because the system wouldn’t. Side by side, they’re the most honest requirements documents in the building, though nobody has ever read them that way.
All field notesCount the asking
Notice how many times a day someone has to ask another person where something is. Nobody owns that number or reports it, and yet it’s one of the better measures of how well the system is designed.
All field notes
About
Biography
Operational leader · Business systems strategist · Managing Director, Revuity Systems
Jay Burgess is an operational systems leader who uses forward deployed engineering, data science, analytics, and systems thinking to help businesses operate more effectively. He’s Managing Director of Revuity Systems, an operational systems company based in Los Angeles.
Read the full biography
Company
Revuity Systems
I founded Revuity Systems to build an operational systems company around one simple idea: important work shouldn’t have to fight the systems around it.
Visit Revuity Systems ↗
Archive
Archive
The systems, research, writing, frameworks and work I’ve collected over time.
Explore the archive| Year | Title | Type |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | The Forward Deployed Engineer | Essay |
| 2026 | Operational Systems | Idea |
| 2026 | The Coordination Tax | Essay |
