Case Study: Quality Control
A real-life look at quality control issues in an outsourced marketing team, and solutions.
This is a real-life case study based on my personal experience. Find the rest of the case studies here.
To learn more about the Foundational Ideas the case studies are based on, go here.
Recently, I caught up with an old colleague of mine, who we’ll call “John”. John now has my old job with greatly expanded responsibilities. As part of his work, he oversees a team of marketing-type freelancers whose goal is to keep the business in the minds of consumers. The freelancing arrangement is strictly task-based:
“These are tasks X, Y, Z that we’ll pay for, we have budget to pay you for up to 10 tasks per week but no more. You manage your own time & how much or how little you want to work, just send us an invoice each month.”
The business provides some instruction around format & delivery as well as some general guidelines on content and spot-checks the output. The arrangement has been running on autopilot because there are other, much more important, priorities within the business and the freelancer team has been approximately left to their own devices.
John’s problem is that he is now spending too much time spot-checking. The freelancers are going outside the scope of the work required. He has two main types of issues, with the freelance team:
Getting too creative
Saying things that can’t be said
(NB: This is a classic “the way we do the work” problem. Read this post to get a better picture of how to think about these types of problems.)
I’ll talk through them quickly here:
Getting too creative:
The business is currently going through the process of figuring out its core audience. It is not comfortable with (& currently it is not appropriate for) the freelance team to be stretching the boundaries of how the business presents itself to customers.
Separately, my guess is that some of the freelance team wants to become full-time employees, so they are showing their capabilities to get to a point where they are offered a full-time job.
Employment status is a big point of tension in outsourced “dedicated” freelance teams, but it deserves a fuller discussion elsewhere. For now, it might be enough to say that this business does not restrict their employment (the freelancers can work for whoever they like), but is typically the freelancers’ sole employer. The freelancers are offshored and live in regions with lower standards of living.
In terms of “getting too creative”, this business sits in a defined part of the value chain. When it over-stretches its messaging, it starts to compete with other parts of the value chain (including its customers) in areas where business is not equipped to deliver outcomes.
Saying things that can’t be said:
Hypothetically, imagine that this business works as a service provider to lenders. It helps the lender understand which borrowers are likely to be good quality. It does not make or fund loans, does not make credit checks, and does not generate revenue based on loan quality or deterioration.
The way to understand this is to realise that the business is completely unable to deliver a good outcome to its customers (lenders), but it offers tools that can be used to arrive at a better outcome.
As a result, there is a clear line between what the business can reasonably say without either over-promising to its customers, or stepping into their area of expertise (e.g. telling them who to lend to).
The types of things that can be said might hypothetically look something like this:
Can be said: “This type of customer’s credit quality tends to present better initially & then deteriorate in later years. We would be wary of under-provisioning & there may be opportunities to optimise pricing.”
Can’t be said: “This type of customer is not a good credit” or “if you lend to this type of customer, you should charge more & provision at a higher rate”.
Do you see the issue? The types of comment in the second example are too definite & are also telling customers how to conduct their business.
The problem:
As you can already see, this is a complex problem because it touches on at least 3-4 different domains (staff skills + needs / the process for delivering the outcome / customer perception & brand messaging).
Currently, when John identifies these issues during his spot checks, he’ll call them out and take the time to educate the team on how to avoid this problem in the future. I asked John* how he’s currently communicating direction to the team, and how the team can know what is “good” and “not good” when working:
“We have a process set up where we identify topics of interest / things that are happening, and we put these on a list for the team. There’s a short instruction document that the team follows to produce something of the right size, tone, subject matter, etc.
In terms of knowing what we can and can’t say, we have two principles which are:
We don’t tell people what to do, and
We don’t promise outcomes.”
My first comment for John was simply that it is very difficult to turn principle into action, especially for junior employees that were new to the company & industry (as indeed, the freelancers are).
Principles are easy to say but they are hard to implement consistently at the coal face, because implementation has shades of grey & requires judgement. You simply can’t expect a team of junior outsourced staff to demonstrate superb judgement about your business without some help.
Imagine if, as the marketing team, you say:
“Loans like X could be costing you $5,000 per year”, alongside a chart illustrating deterioration in credit quality for a given subset of clients. Is that too definite? Are we telling people what to do? Are we promising a definite outcome? Are we getting too far into our client’s area of expertise?
Maybe what we should say instead is: “Loans like X may not be as good as they look”.
Do you see the difference? Is there even a difference? It’s nuanced.
My comment to John was there must be at least ten different ways someone could implement those principles and still be wrong. There’s a gap that needs to be closed here – how, as a freelancer, do I turn this general principle into specific action?
Actionable Principles
John realised what he’d been doing was basically solving the “ten different ways” one by one as they came up. He acknowledged that he’d solved roughly the first four or so and wasn’t having issues with those anymore.
This was powerful validation that his teaching was working and that the team was receptive (both are critical). Still, spot-checking consumed too much of his time and he needed to be able to “scale” the education piece to free up his time.
Before we went into that though, I asked him another question. How often are you meeting with the freelance team? Do you catch up with them regularly & are they aware of what the company’s goals and strategy are?
Are they being contextualised to the business? The problem that John has is mechanical, in the sense that he needs to find a way to reduce the spot-checking burden, but it is at heart a context/education problem.
If the freelancers (who are good team members & generally performing well) knew how to do their work in the way that John wanted, he wouldn’t have to spot check all the time.
The last time that John checked in with the team?
“About nine months ago.”
Yeah. I mean the solution basically writes itself here but I like this example because it illustrates the trade-offs made in real businesses.
John had made a 100% correct call in leaving the freelance team on autopilot while he sorted out more important issues regarding overall strategy and direction for part of the business. In doing that & moving the business forward, he’d now arrived at a point where the freelance team could be invested in and aligned to the strategy.
This problem was the inevitable consequence of good prioritisation.
How to actually solve the problem
We talked about a few different ways of getting that context & freeing him up to keep executing:
· More regular context sessions on where business marketing is at & where it’s going, so the team can see how their work fits in
· Education sessions for translating the principles into action
· Write a guide for the team on what can & can’t be said
· Give tougher projects to the freelancers that they can stretch themselves on (i.e. channel their desire to perform in a structured way, keeping them within the guardrails)
· Hire someone to manage the freelancers & own that process
· Hire the freelancers as permanent staff so they can attend company meetings etc & get up to speed (with a concomitant increase in expectations – to self-manage this stream of work)
Given certain constraints on hiring and the limitations of hands-off approaches like guides, John elected to go with some education and context sessions, as well as more regular check-ins.
The aim is that by investing time up front, he can hopefully solve these issues in the near term and reduce ongoing maintenance in the future.
There is a bigger picture here in terms of standardising the process so that John can hire his own replacement to run this work in future, but the immediate priority is getting the process working in an acceptable way.
Since this is a work in progress for John, I will leave it there. With any luck he’ll get it right first time, but remember - businesses are iterative.
Try something, measure it, and if that doesn’t work, try something else.
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Until next time,
Minion
*I have edited John’s answers lightly to protect his identity & obscure sensitive details of the business.