Big is Beautiful – or not?

In support, Big is Beautiful. It’s much easier to schedule and organize tasks if you have a large team. Specialization is costly. If only one or a handful of people can accomplish a particular task, great care is required to ensure that they are available at any one time. Therefore, a good goal would be to have a large team that’s perfectly cross-trained and can handle any kind of issue. Of course, that’s not always realistic since that perfectly cross-trained criteria can be an impossible task, but sometimes big is not the way to go. Let’s explore counter-examples:

Bigger is not necessarily beautiful. It’s very handy to assemble a team of 10-20 people with equivalent skills, to be scheduled flexibly, but a team of 100-200 people can easily be divided into more specialized sub-teams if that would be more effective for the business.
Small and personalized can sell. Some customers will pay extra for more personalized service, delivered by one or two assigned individuals who can develop a close knowledge of and relationship with the customer. To avoid issues when the designated contact is off duty, pre-arrange a backup (often through the pool of employees that serve non-premium customers).
A dedicated team can provide focus. For key customers, it may makes sense from the vendor’s perspective to assign a team that handles all aspects of the relationship. So this is not a customer request to get premium service, but the vendor’s acknowledgement that a customer is so large and has such special needs that it makes sense to service them separately from other customers. This is a great opportunity to blend services seamlessly, so that the team members can provide support, consulting, and training in a flexible manner.

Are you using processes that go against the Big is Beautiful principle? Please share in the comments