No Customer Focus

Posted on November 3, 2006  Comments (3)

John Battelle writes the excellent searchblog. A recent post, Rant: The Comcast HD DVR Is Simply, Terribly Awful, provides another example of a company lacking customer focus. See the comments for even more confirmation of the lack of customer focus.

The interface is simply abominable. Unintuitive and careless, it copies the major features of Tivo’s approach but fails at every single detail – and in UI design, everything is in the details. No surprisingly, it utterly misses the core purpose of a DVR: to treat television as a conversation instead of a dictation. Without a doubt, this is an interface built either by Machiavelli’s cohorts, or by graceless bureaucrats, or both. No, wait, it’s worse.
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Not to mention, the damn thing is slow – beyond unresponsive. There’s no way you can accurately predict where and when the thing might stop and start when you are fast forwarding or rewinding. The Tivo is like an Audi, but the Comcast drives like a 1972 Gran Torino Station wagon.
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But that’s not where the crappiness ends. No, not by a long shot. Turns out, the ####### Comcast HD DVR *does not have a hard drive.* That’s right, when the power goes out, the ####### box loses ALL OF THE SAVED PROGRAMS!!!!

Related: posts on customer focus (including doing it right) – Usability Failures – Customer Focus at the Ritz – CEO Flight Attendant – Companies in Need of Customer Focus – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus

What is Wrong with MBA’s

Posted on November 2, 2006  Comments (4)

Two interesting posts from Compound Thinking: What is Management?:

Management is helping others become great.

Well said. As Deming would say management’s responsibility is to work on improving the system (to allow everyone in the system to do great work). This encompasses a wide variety of things. Creating sensible hiring processes. Designing systems that allow people to do great work and take pride in what they do. Providing a system of education and training.

What’s wrong with MBAs?:

MBA graduates generally aren’t the kind of people dedicated to helping other people achieve greatness.

Instead, they want to achieve greatness on their own — which can be a worthy goal. It’s just a terrible goal for a manager. Good managers are relentlessly focused on helping the people they work for perform at their best.

There certainly is something about MBA graduates that they often focus on measuring how important they are and how much they should be paid. I think his statement that managers should be dedicated to helping others achieve greatness. This can run counter to performance appraisals schemes where people have to claim responsibility for successes in order to get more cash. It is hard enough to move toward great systems when you have to have credit for each success fought over so it is known who gets the spoils it is much harder.

Related: Joel’s MBA – Deming’s 14 obligations of management – posts about respect for people – Seven Deadly Diseases

Information Quality

Posted on November 1, 2006  Comments (0)

The 14 Points of Information Quality Transformation by Larry English, looks at Deming’s 14 obligations of management form information quality perspective:

Drive out fear of data uncertainty or data errors. Create a nonblame, nonjudgmental environment. Encourage risk to change without punishing missteps. Encourage improvement by eliminating root causes without blame.

Fear often can lead to obfuscated, hidden and even faked data. And certainly it is hard to get open and honest sharing of data with a prevalent culture of personal blame (compared to a culture of looking for system improvements).

Related: Dangers of Forgetting the Proxy Nature of Data – Targets Distorting the System – Measurement and Data Collection – Evidence-based Management

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