Building a successful business operations team requires establishing a strong organizational foundation. Defining roles and responsibilities is a critical first step to ensure clarity, accountability, and efficient task allocation among team members. Equally critical is establishing clear and effective communication channels. These channels are the backbone of collaboration, enabling the team to coordinate efforts, share information, resolve issues, and maintain alignment with business objectives. Without these two foundational elements, a team cannot function cohesively or effectively, regardless of the tools or specific procedures it uses.

B. Automating all team workflows: Automation is an efficiency-improving tactic applied to established processes, not a foundational step for building the team itself. The goal of automating all workflows is often unrealistic and premature.

D. Standardizing customer interaction templates: This is a specific operational task focused on quality and consistency. It is a process refinement, not a fundamental requirement for structuring the team's existence and core function.

1. Pega Academy, "Organizing the 1:1 Customer Engagement team" Mission: This courseware details the necessity of creating a well-structured team to manage Pega Customer Decision Hub™. It explicitly outlines various roles (e.g., NBA Specialist, Data Scientist, Business Owner) and their responsibilities, underscoring the principle of "Defining roles and responsibilities" (A) as a cornerstone of team setup.

2. Pega Community, "Building a Pega Center of Excellence (CoE)": Official Pega documentation on establishing a CoE, which is a formalized business operations team, consistently identifies "People" and "Process/Governance" as core pillars. The "People" pillar involves defining roles, skills, and responsibilities. The "Process/Governance" pillar emphasizes establishing communication protocols, meeting cadences, and decision-making frameworks, which directly corresponds to "Establishing communication channels" (C).

3. Pega Express™ Delivery Approach Documentation: The "Prepare" and "Adopt" phases of the Pega Express methodology emphasize setting up the project team and governance structure. This includes defining team roles and establishing a communication plan to ensure all stakeholders are aligned, reinforcing the criticality of options A and C for any Pega-related operational team.