How did I deliver over-promised commitments of someone else?
Challenges are good but if the troubles are created by someone and you are at the receiving end as an organisation, you are equally responsible for the thing. Something similar happened to me during my first journey as a COO.
When I joined the post as an operations executive in MAYVARY, the client was already on board and opportunity seemed so overwhelming that I couldn’t resist the workload. When the time passed gradually, I became aware that the commitments that I was supposed to deliver were far more out of our capacity and present human resources.
What was the challenge?
We were supposed to deliver high-quality social media strategy with image content 4 per week and text articles 2 per month. We were supposed to deliver an entire plan for portraying a person into a brand with his own website and corporate branding with world-class quality.
At that time the status quo was, we were having no designers in house and 1 amateur intern who was trying to do Wordpress site for one event.
What did I do?
As having a background in procurement I thought on “Make or Buy” decision. I segregated the committed parts in mainly three sections on a page.
- What we can do but should not do? — Outsource
- What we have to do and couldn’t do? — Find a supplier.
- What we can do and should do? — DIY
Now for finding suppliers and outsourcing, the problem was it was too costly to get it from Berlin-based agencies and Freelancers. So I turned towards India where I could get the cheapest agencies to design graphics with the understanding of European colours and design mindset.
Fast forwarding, I did scan the market in India contacted costly, cheap, affordable, over-promising and freelancers. Finally, I got a few young guys running a nice graphic design agency.
The next challenge was the operation processes,
How to provide seamless communication and task management that can scale in future with more participants?
The quest of a software war immediate as we jammed much of work with WhatsApp miscommunications and Google Sheets with trillions of google drive links.
I elicited requirements and current process flow on a whiteboard, I established a relationship among each step. Then transformed each step into possible software analogy and made a process flow that can work entirely using software and minimum gates of information passage.
I have been operating the team of Graphic designers, Copywriters and IT developers with 2 main softwares slack and Asana. I personally manage my dashboard and research in Notion and Google Sheets.
I delivered a pile of graphic design work with pre-assigned tasks with deadlines and start date and managed client at the same time by scaling the communication and removing unnecessary steps.
Its all about writing processes on paper > converting into software analogy > finding the right tool to perform them.
How did I manage the cost?
I found only free software up to a certain limit and also used trials.
I found suppliers and using my negotiation skills I kept my prices under the cap with future project promises and retainer contracts which I actually fulfilled.
It was mostly about finding the right resources in the right geographies and take advantage of the currency value gap.
