About TightOps

TightOps is about people working together in the modern work environment. It is a framework for team communication and collaboration with a sense of flow: low stress, high efficiency.

In today’s knowledge worker era, no one is working in isolation. The TightOps framework provides guidelines and best practices for team interactions, communication, and processes.

The purpose of TightOps is to upgrade your team and company — in a sane way.

We created TightOps because we needed it – we soon found out others do as well.

Ways to Connect

Send an email nico@tightops.com Find us on LinkedIn.

(Hi)Story

Tight Operations, short TightOps, was started by Nico Appel and Max Lielje in 2012.

Like many freelancers and entrepreneurs, we have studied and applied various personal Most popular productivity methods focus on the individual. They are about managing oneself. At the other end of the spectrum you find full-fledged project management methodology, which focuses on various roles and the management of resources, tasks and deliverables.

But how does a team best communicate and collaborate? Just because you put a writer, a designer and a developer on a project to create a website, it is not at all given that they will produce the desired outcome in a well-coordinated and efficient manner.

We figured, for this to happen, there have to be some basic guidelines in place. When you first learn about them, our TightOps framework, you might think: Okay, that makes sense.

And that is by design.

We asked ourselves over and over: What would be the best solution in this situation? And bit by bit, we built, documented and refined this framework – for being practical and applicable, not as mere theory. It has to make practical sense and improve work for everyone on the team. It can’t be an artificially complicated, or even proprietary thing.

We found that low-quality communication causes various problems, frustration and misunderstandings within and across teams. These symptoms hurt actual people and leave them dissatisfied and frustrated with their work. We wanted to sort out the apparent communication mess that exists almost everywhere and find a way to get work done efficiently and in a sustainable way.

Back in 2011, we were managing a team at rethink, a growing media agency in Berlin. The young company was hiring continuously to keep up with increasing demand. There was little structure in the onboarding process. People got a desk with a computer, plus an introduction to the espresso machine. We had talented people, but no standards for how they should communicate and collaborate, no framework which would help them get coordinated. Most companies don’t have that.

And it’s generally accepted for the most part. But: it should not be.

Around the same time, Nico was working to restructure and reorganize his wife’s company to allow for it to be managed and run location-independent. The task was to take a brick and mortar business and make it

scalable,
structurally reliable, and
flexible (managed from anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection).

In 2012 Nico joined Chris Kirkland at ArtWeb.com to run marketing and operations. ArtWeb was a remote company with a distributed team spread across multiple continents and time zones. This was a perfect opportunity to apply and further develop Tight Operations.

What you find here today are the results of our continuous experiments, real-life experience and the desire to work with people creatively in a dynamic environment while acting economically and not sacrificing our sanity.

Welcome to TightOps!