Beginning at launch on Christmas Day 2021, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, was the focus of activity to deploy, align, and activate the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Despite the daunting complexity of the observatory, each of these critical stages of commissioning were performed more flawlessly than the team could possibly have imagined. At STScI, decades of effort have been invested in preparing to operate JWST. STScI worked with NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency from the very first formative stages of the project, to define what science a large infrared space-based observatory could do and to study how to implement such a mission. STScI engaged with the international engineering and science teams through what proved to be a long design, development and testing process to get the observatory ready for launch. As a primary responsibility, on contract to NASA, STScI developed and built the JWST Science and Operations Center. STScI now operates the telescope and conducts the science program for the mission, engaging thousands of astronomers around the world. By July of 2022, commissioning of the observatory was completed and the STScI operations teams started executing the science program using the observatory’s automated operations capabilities. JWST was nonetheless a completely new observatory and initially operations required frequent human involvement. Over the course of the year since commissioning ended, while science observations were ongoing, the transition into normalized day to day operations has continued and is now essentially complete. The telescope has proven to have extraordinary optical quality and sensitivity that are enabling ground-breaking scientific results. But how does the reality of operating JWST compare to the mission operations concept? This paper discusses how operating an open architecture, cryogenic, 6.5-m, segmented, deployable, infrared telescope at L2 compares with what was expected and prepared for.