Delivering service quality at scale

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

One of the challenges we all face is scarce resources. Not having enough time, tools, money, or team members to deliver can be an everyday experience. This scarcity can be overwhelming to those involved in situations where demand exceeds the available supply of a product or service. But could it be that we are looking at our problem in the wrong way?

In a recent post by Seth Godin - Mouth to mouth resuscitation, he points out the value of this lifesaving intervention. But it does not scale. You cannot perform Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) on more than one person at a time. Yes, you could scale it by training more people, but it is still a service delivered singularly, one at a time.

"It might be the best way to save someone in distress. But it doesn’t scale. You can only offer this sort of lifesaving intervention to one person at a time." — Seth Godin

This analogy has a direct relation to the concept of communications, design, and creative work. As we produce art that's on-brand and relevant to the world we are experiencing, how do you deliver bespoke art at scale?

So far in my career, I've built, managed, and lead the introduction of multiple platforms and technologies. These platforms have supported marketing, content, brand, design, video, and training. In speaking with my team leaders over the last few weeks, I've asked them to to to consider how they could deliver double the amount of work they produce now using tools, technology, and automation?

Seth's post has prompted me to think about this from the root cause. To continue his analogy, if we deliver CPR and do it well, we cannot scale CPR. But is CPR what is required? How else can we provide services around brand and design, content, media, events, video, animation, and web?

This awareness causes me to rethink how else we could solve the problem and produce the same quality results? The service must still restore and maintain the health of the patient.

What service can we deliver of the same quality or better - using technology and automation? One of the questions I'll also be taking a deeper look at is how we could use training to enable the user to self-serve and deflect the need for the service entirely?