Standard Operating Procedure, process, workflow… a couple of years ago I thought these were all by words for bloat and the antithesis of working quickly or making progress. It’s fair to say I’ve done a full turn on that one: I now run a process-driven company where how we do everything is built around process.
This post isn’t about that, though: this about how we use process to be a technology-driven service company.
Working with process in a business that relies on humans doing the work is nothing new. Using technology to add scale to those processes is a different and exciting way if doing things.
We work with technology companies, and a common viewpoint is that services don’t scale. Products are viewed as the superior option for their scale. One client even said to me once; “Alex you’re not stupid, so why don’t you make products?”
I see our processes as the product, and building technology around those services is how we scale. We do, of course, need to offer services led by humans and we’ll never dramatically scale beyond the number of hours the team works in a week. But, I suspect how we’ve scaled our processes and become a technology-driven company wasn’t possible even a couple of years ago. I also suspect others are massively under-utilising the methodology we use. This post aims to be insightful and enlightening.
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