Currently browsing the Customer focus Category

posts relating to customer focus, customer service...
Recommended posts: Companies in Need of Customer Focus - Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus - No Customer Focus - Usability Failures
Related: Voice of the Customer - Kano Model of customer satisfaction


Akio Toyoda’s Message Shows Real Leadership

Posted on July 26, 2009  Comments (8)

Speech by Akio Toyoda

Since the birth of Toyota, the company’s philosophy has always been to “contribute to society.”
…
“Contributing to society” at Toyota means two things. First, it means, “to manufacture automobiles that meet the needs of society and enrich people’s lives.” And second, “to take root in the communities we serve by creating jobs, earning profits and paying taxes, thereby enriching the local economies where we operate.”
…
Toyota has overcome many challenges during its seven decades of business. What has made this possible is the way we make our cars under our “customer first” and “genchi genbutsu” principles
…
Rather than asking, “How many cars will we sell?” or, “How much money will we make by selling these cars?” we need to ask ourselves, “What kind of cars will make people happy?” as well as, “What pricing will attract them in each region?” Then we must make those cars.
…
Through these processes, I would like to make Toyota’s product development and product lineup more region-focused. We will change our policy from achieving “a full lineup everywhere” to “a lineup necessary to meet the needs of each region”. We will also launch new vehicles that anticipate consumer needs and are exciting to drive.
…
At the press conference in January, I talked about my desire to become “a president who is closest to the frontlines, or gemba.” I believe that the essence of management lies in the gemba, and Toyota employees play a vital role there.

Once again Toyota shows they are the type of management I want to invest in. In my last post I discussed another: Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Google management is another management system I am glad to invest in. Toyota, Amazon and Google are 3 of my 12 stocks for 10 year portfolio.

Toyota continues to show they are an exceptional company that doesn’t waver due to short term pressures. They know the management system they have in place is excellent. They always try to improve. And they react to evidence that shows they have room to improve. They then access the situation and move forward.

via: Toyoda on Toyota: A New Regime, A New Future

Related: New Toyota CEO’s Views (2005) – Interview with Toyota President (2006) – Deming Companies – “2007 has been a difficult year for Toyota” – No Excessive Senior Executive Pay at Toyota – Webcast on the Toyota Development Process

Continue reading →

Zappos and Amazon Sitting in a Tree…

Posted on July 23, 2009  Comments (6)

Amazon is acquiring the unique company – Zappos: we have written about Zappos previously: Paying New Employees to Quit. Jeff Bezos uses the webcast above to talk to the employees of Zappos. Excellent job. The letter from Tony Hsieh, the Zappo’s CEO, to employees is fantastic. This is a CEO that respects employees. These are leaders I would follow and invest in (and in fact I am glad I do own Amazon stock).

First, I want to apologize for the suddenness of this announcement. As you know, one of our core values is to Build Open and Honest Relationships With Communication, and if I could have it my way, I would have shared much earlier that we were in discussions with Amazon so that all employees could be involved in the decision process that we went through along the way. Unfortunately, because Amazon is a public company, there are securities laws that prevented us from talking about this to most of our employees until today.
…
Several months ago, they reached out to us and said they wanted to join forces with us so that we could accelerate the growth of our business, our brand, and our culture. When they said they wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand (as opposed to folding us into Amazon), we decided it was worth exploring what a partnership would look like.

We learned that they truly wanted us to continue to build the Zappos brand and continue to build the Zappos culture in our own unique way. I think “unique” was their way of saying “fun and a little weird.” :)

Over the past several months, as we got to know each other better, both sides became more and more excited about the possibilities for leveraging each other’s strengths. We realized that we are both very customer-focused companies — we just focus on different ways of making our customers happy.

Amazon focuses on low prices, vast selection and convenience to make their customers happy, while Zappos does it through developing relationships, creating personal emotional connections, and delivering high touch (“WOW”) customer service.

Continue reading →

United Breaks Guitars

Posted on July 7, 2009  Comments (2)

Unfortunately companies like United have created cultures where people take pride in doing their job poorly. And the continued long term customer hostility companies take shows no sign of letting up. My suggestion is to take Southwest or Jet Blue (or Singapore Airlines or Cathay Pacific).

Unfortunately sometimes you need to travel somewhere that no airline that cares about customer service flies. Then just hope somehow the broken system you must trust to get you someplace somehow doesn’t fail you too badly. Or you can follow the increasingly common trend and publicize the horrible service you were subjected to, in your blog or perhaps your own webcast.

Related: Airline Quality – CEO Flight Attendant – Japan Airlines CEO on CEO Pay – Respect for Employees at Southwest Airlines – Incredibly Bad Customer Service from Discover Card

Computer Network Operations Center Failures

Posted on July 3, 2009  Comments (0)

Obviously many businesses are now dependent on computer Network Operations Centers (NOC). Some of these data centers can cause millions of dollars in lost sales each minute if they fail. So sound engineering, including off-site redundancy is critical. Authorize.net is a recent example of such a failure, Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours… That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites, it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.
…
A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night). A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.

From what I can piece together it seems within about 5 hours services were back up, at least partially. NOC failures are not uncommon (either due to fire, power failure [including backup systems], government raids, software glitches [not exactly the same as a NOC failure but some can have the affect of essentially knocking off a NOC from providing the specific service desired]). Evaluating these risks must be part of management systems with significant NOC dependencies.

Authorize.net set up a Twitter account and within hours has 2,500 followers. I am not a huge fan of Twitter, it is nice but seems pretty limited to me. But this is an example of using it effectively. You can follow me on Twitter @curiouscat_com.

Related: Information Technology and Business Process Support – Amazon S3 Failure Analysis – Information Technology and Management – IT Operations as a Competitive Advantage – Undersea Cables Cut Again, Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Google Innovates Again with Google Wave

Posted on June 25, 2009  Comments (1)

Google Wave is a new tool for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. They are developing this as an open access project. The creative team is lead by the creators for Google Maps (brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen). A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. You really have to watch to understand what it is.

This is a long webcast (1 hour and 20 minutes) and likely will be best only for those interested in internet technology solutions. But it also provides useful insight into how Google is managing the creation of new tools. But the ideas are not explicit (the demo was meant to present the new product Google Wave, not explain the thought behind producing useful technology solutions), so you have to think about how what they are doing can apply in other situations.

For software developer readers they also highly recommended the Google Web Development Kit, which they used heavily on this project. They also have a very cool context sensitive spell checker that can highlight misspelled words that are another dictionary word but not right in the context used (about 44:30 in the webcast). And they discuss using Wave to manage bug tracking and manage information about dealing with bugs (@ 1 hour 4 min point).

Very cool stuff. The super easy blog interaction is great. And the user experience with notification and collaborative editing seems excellent. The playback feature to view changes seems good though that is still an area I worry about on heavily collaborative work. Hopefully they let you see like all change x person made, search changes…

Related: Eric Schmidt on Management at Google – Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources – Great Marissa Mayer Webcast on Google Innovation – Google Should Stay True to Their Management Practices – Amazon Innovation

Community Medical Care Successes

Posted on June 18, 2009  Comments (1)

The Cost Conundrum by Atul Gawande, New Yorker (The Power of a Checklist was published there in 2007 by the same author)

For example, Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo Clinic dominates the scene, has fantastically high levels of technological capability and quality, but its Medicare spending is in the lowest fifteen per cent of the country—$6,688 per enrollee in 2006, which is eight thousand dollars less than the figure for McAllen. Two economists working at Dartmouth, Katherine Baicker and Amitabh Chandra, found that the more money Medicare spent per person in a given state the lower that state’s quality ranking tended to be. In fact, the four states with the highest levels of spending—Louisiana, Texas, California, and Florida—were near the bottom of the national rankings on the quality of patient care.
…
I talked to Denis Cortese, the C.E.O. of the Mayo Clinic, which is among the highest-quality, lowest-cost health-care systems in the country. A couple of years ago, I spent several days there as a visiting surgeon. Among the things that stand out from that visit was how much time the doctors spent with patients. There was no churn—no shuttling patients in and out of rooms while the doctor bounces from one to the other. I accompanied a colleague while he saw patients. Most of the patients, like those in my clinic, required about twenty minutes. But one patient had colon cancer and a number of other complex issues, including heart disease. The physician spent an hour with her, sorting things out. He phoned a cardiologist with a question.

“I’ll be there,” the cardiologist said. Fifteen minutes later, he was. They mulled over everything together. The cardiologist adjusted a medication, and said that no further testing was needed. He cleared the patient for surgery, and the operating room gave her a slot the next day.

The whole interaction was astonishing to me. Just having the cardiologist pop down to see the patient with the surgeon would be unimaginable at my hospital. The time required wouldn’t pay. The time required just to organize the system wouldn’t pay.

The core tenet of the Mayo Clinic is “The needs of the patient come first”—not the convenience of the doctors, not their revenues. The doctors and nurses, and even the janitors, sat in meetings almost weekly, working on ideas to make the service and the care better, not to get more money out of patients. I asked Cortese how the Mayo Clinic made this possible.

“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.

No one there actually intends to do fewer expensive scans and procedures than is done elsewhere in the country. The aim is to raise quality and to help doctors and other staff members work as a team. But, almost by happenstance, the result has been lower costs. [actually the Deming Chain Reaction] Continue reading →

In-N-Out Burger’s Six Secrets for Success

Posted on May 26, 2009  Comments (1)

image of In-N-Out Burger book cover

In-N-Out Burger’s six secrets for out-and-out success

Listen to Your Customers — One of the company’s mottos is “Our customer is everything.” Applying that belief led to the company policy of preparing burgers just the way customers asked for them. Some of the customer favorites became popular and were eventually adopted as the restaurant chain’s “secret menu.” By listening to their customers, In-N-Out created menu choices other stores couldn’t duplicate.
…
Treat Employees Well — The Snyders always held their employees in high esteem, paying them higher wages than competitors and calling them associates to make them feel more connected to the franchise.

“They believed in sharing their success with their employees,” says Perman, noting that In-N-Out associates make $10 an hour working part-time and starting store managers make $100,000, plus bonuses tied to store performance. The company benefits package is also generous. Such treatment engenders loyalty from workers.

“They have the lowest turnover rate in the fast food industry, which is notorious for turnover,” says Perman. “They say that the average manager’s tenure is 14 years, but they have managers who have been there 30 or 40 years.”

Keep Things Simple and Consistent…

The fundamental idea of respecting people is something most executives seem to have no interest in. Treating employees as the critical partners in organizational success is just something that doesn’t leap out at you based on the actions of most managers, unfortunately. And that poor management damages the performance of the organization.

Read more about In-N-Out Burger management practices in Stacy Perman’s new book In-N-Out Burger: A Behind-the-Counter Look at the Fast-Food Chain That Breaks All the Rules.

Related: Respect for Workers at In-N-Out Burger (Nov 2006) – Building a Great Workforce – Another Year of CEO’s Taking Hugely Excessive Pay – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – People are Our Most Important Asset

Joel Spolsky Webcast on Creating Social Web Resources

Posted on May 4, 2009  Comments (1)

Joel Spolsky webcast on creating Stack Overflow (with the goal of providing answers to professional programmers) using ideas from anthropology. Once again he provides great information. This is particularly interesting for software development but also just a good presentation for understanding the importance of customer focus and systems thinking.

What they focused on and did:

  • Voting – Reddit… (see our management Reddit)
  • Tags – lets you see what you want and to block tags you don’t want to see.
  • Editing – letting users edit the questions and responses. For a technical question and answer system this is very useful (based on my experience).
  • Badges – people like to earn “credit” (psychology)
  • Karma – “people are willing to do for free what people are not willing to do for small amounts of money” (psychology)
  • Pre-search – provide quick view of previously answered questions
  • Google is UI – Assumption: “the front page is Google search” – build based on the idea people will search via Google
  • Performance – 16 million pages a month with 2 web servers. They are using the Microsoft stack, not open source.
  • Critical mass – they focused on getting a large user base on day one of the beta site

Related: posts related to Joel Spolsky – Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – Information Technology and Management – What Motivates Programmers?

Building a Great Workforce

Posted on April 13, 2009  Comments (0)

How P&G Finds and Keeps a Prized Workforce by Roger O. Crockett

“We actually recruit for values,” says Chief Operating Officer Robert McDonald. “If you are not inspired to improve lives, this isn’t the company you want to work for.”
…
The P&G strategy starts on college campuses. The Cincinnati company dispatches line managers rather than human resource staffers to do much of its recruiting.
…
For the few who get hired, their work life becomes a career-long development process. At every level, P&G has a different “college” to train individuals, and every department has its own “university.” The general manager’s college, which McDonald leads, holds a week-long school term once a year when there are a handful of newly promoted managers. Further training—there are nearly 50 courses—helps managers with technical writing or financial analysis.

Career education takes place outside the classroom, too. P&G pushes every general manager to log at least one foreign assignment of three to five years. Even high-ranking employees visit the homes of consumers to watch how they cook, clean, and generally live, in a practice dubbed “live it, work it.” Managers also visit retail stores, occasionally even scanning and bagging items at checkout lanes, to learn more about customers.

Going to visit the gemba, the actual place is incredibly important, and far too often ignored by managers today.

The emphasis on life long learning (in practice, not just words) is also very wise. In my experience far to little emphasis is placed on continual improvement of what many companies will say is their most important asset: their people. If you don’t invest in education of your staff that is going to harm your long term success. The investment P&G makes shows a respect for people.

Related: Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon’s Kentucky Distribution Center – Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno – Respect for People, Understanding Psychology – Ohno Circle
Continue reading →

Jeff Bezos Spends a Week Working in Amazon’s Kentucky Distribution Center

Posted on March 28, 2009  Comments (4)

Photo of Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEOPhoto of Jeff Bezos during the 2005 O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference by James Duncan.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, is working for a week in Amazon’s Kentucky distribution center. I hope, and based on his past, I believe, that he is going to the gemba (Genchi Genbutsu) to learn more about how Amazon operates. That would be great.

He worked on wall street and understands the fake constraints they attempt to put companies (you must focus on short term profits, you must focus on pleasing wall street analysts not customers…). He understood the importance of managing cash flow and the unimportance of short term profits. And he understands the importance of customer focus. He understands lean thinking. We need more CEO’s like him.

Amazon CEO comes to Lexington

“Thanks so much for your interest in speaking with our CEO Jeff Bezos,” said spokeswoman Patty Smith. “Unfortunately, I’m not going to be able to arrange any interviews or photos this week while he is in Lexington.

“He is there to work,” Smith said, “and, unfortunately, we are just not scheduling any interviews while he is in town.”

Local Amazon employees say Bezos is working in the warehouse with the company’s hourly employees to see what they do and hear their comments about their work. Most CEOs would benefit from spending a few days on the shop floor.

Once again his actions indicate he is the type of CEO I want to invest in.

via: Jeff Bezos Works In Kentucky Distribution Center For A Week

Related: Jeff Bezos and Root Cause Analysis – Management by Walking Around – Amazon Innovation – Amazon’s Amazing Achievement – Louisville Slugger, Deming Practices – Management Excellence

Knowledge, Imagination, Innovation and Risk

Posted on March 23, 2009  Comments (0)

A consumer can seldom say today what new product or new service would be desirable and useful to him three years from now, or a decade from now. New product and new types of service are generated, not by asking the consumer, but by knowledge, imagination, innovation, risk, trial and error on the part of the producer, backed by enough capital to develop the product or service and to stay in business during the lean months of introduction.

W. Edwards Deming
Page 182, Out of the Crisis
More of Deming on Innovation

Related: Innovation Thinking with Clayton Christensen – Engineering Innovation – Managing Innovation – Gary Hamel on Management Innovation

Customer Friendly Terms of Use Language

Posted on March 19, 2009  Comments (0)

The Aviary web site provides a very nice example of customer focus. They provide the legalese version of the terms of use and then explain what this actually mean in is simple terms. Good job. Legalese example

2. SITE CONTENT. The Site and its contents are intended solely for the use of Aviary Users and may only be used in accordance with the terms of this Agreement. All materials displayed or performed on the Site, other than content developed or posted by User (“User Content”) including, but not limited to text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, audio and video, and animations (“Content”) are the property of Aviary and/or third parties and are protected by United States and international copyright laws. As between you and Aviary, however, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to all of your User Content (subject only to the limited license therein granted to Aviary under this Section 2). The Services may enable Users to develop derivative works based on other Users’ Content. In the event you use the Services to develop a derivative work of another User’s Content with that User’s permission, as between you and the User who developed the original work, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to your derivative work, and the User who developed the original work retains the sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to the original work. In the event you permit other Users to use the Services to develop derivative works based on your User Content, as between you and the User who developed the derivative work, you own and retain sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to your original work, and the User who developed the derivative work retains the sole and exclusive right, title and interest in and to the derivative work. All trademarks, service marks, and trade names which appear on the Site (other than those appearing in any User Content) are proprietary to Aviary and/or third parties. You shall abide by all copyright notices, information, and restrictions contained in any Content accessed through the Services.

Readable example

  • We own our website.
  • You own your content.
  • If you allow another user to make a derivative, you still own your work.
  • Please don’t disregard our copyright notices. :)
  • Some content may be licensed under Creative Commons.
  • You can download anything on the site for personal, non-commercial use only. Other uses are not OK (unless you purchased the work from the creator).
  • Just because we let you use our applications doesn’t give you any property ownership in the applications. You are just granted a license to use it.
  • Aviary is allowed to display within Aviary, any work you make available to everyone to view.
  • Additionally, we can allow the work to be used by a third party in a way which promotes Aviary (for example, using the work alongside a newspaper article about Aviary).
  • The content you contribute may not infringe on the property rights of others.

Related: Making Life Difficult for Customers – Gobbledygook – Complicating Simplicity – User Happiness with Search Engines

Newspaper Innovation In Kansas

Posted on January 29, 2009  Comments (1)

The newspaper industry is facing challenging times. One success story is the Lawrence Journal-World in Lawrence, Kansas. I first heard about their efforts years ago:

Watchful Eyes on Kansas Media Innovations, NPR, 2005

Many media companies hoped that convergence — combining television, print and online resources — would help them survive. Instead, many companies have lost money on online journalism. In Lawrence, Kan., Dolph Simons’ Journal-World newspaper has taken ambitious news-gathering approaches to local issues.

The Newspaper of the Future, by Timothy O’Brien, New York Times

Lawrencians buying tickets for University of Kansas football games can visit the same site, LJWorld.com, and find photographs offering sightlines from each of Memorial Stadium’s 50,000 seats. Law aficionados can find transcripts of locally significant court cases posted on the site and participate in live, online chats debating the pros or cons of some cases – sometimes with experts who are involved in the proceedings.

A related Web site, lawrence.com, is aimed at college readers. It allows visitors to download tunes from the Wakarusa Music Festival, find spirited reviews of local bars and restaurants and plunge into a vast trove of blogs
…
The steward of this online smorgasbord is Dolph C. Simons Jr., a politically conservative, 75-year-old who corresponds via a vintage Royal typewriter and red grease pencil while eschewing e-mail and personal computers. “I don’t think of us as being in the newspaper business,” said Mr. Simons, the editor and publisher of The Journal-World and the chairman of the World Company, the newspaper’s parent. “Information is our business and we’re trying to provide information, in one form or another, however the consumer wants it and wherever the consumer wants it, in the most complete and useful way possible.”

The company has continued on an path of customer focus and innovation. There work shows what can be done by understanding what need you fulfill for customers.

They understand what they offer customers (and it isn’t just paper). They understand the technology related to their business (not the technology of their past methods of working but the technology possibilities related to serving their customers). They understand the realities of the marketplace. And they have divined a strategy based on this knowledge (they have innovated). And finally, the Lawrence Journal-World has maintained a constancy of purpose.

Related: Zipcar Innovation – Innovation Strategy – Information Technology and Business Process Support Continue reading →

Lame Move by Google

Posted on November 2, 2008  Comments (0)

Google does great things and makes good decisions most often. However a recent move on their part has ended very lamely. As part of what their 10th anniversary celebration they provided a search of the 2001 index (the oldest index they could find to search now). This was extremely cool.

Now if you go to find it so you can try it out you will be disappointed. Search for it on Google you will find a link to Google Search 2001 which gives you a page that says: “The page – www.google.com/search2001.html – does not exist.” Is it amazingly lame that Google took the search down, has it has the first result on searches, and has no explanation on that page of what it was about.

It would be cool for them to leave it up (it was interesting). And I would think they could make a great deal of money showing ads (I can’t remember if they did show ads). But not leaving a page at that address (which was linked to over 95,000 times) explaining what the page did and that it is now offline is very lame. Breaking 95,000 links is bad enough for some pointy haired boss that believes the internet is made up of tubes but for a well run internet company to do that is pitiful.

This move shows Google in a similar light as Gap when managers shut down the Gap’s web site for days (in 2005). Google failed when exiting the video business (DRM issues), then realized their mistake and recovered. The fix for this would take all of 1 hour. Someone just has to put up a page discussing what the page was for and that the search has been discontinued.

But really they should explore if it is better to just make it live – maybe it doesn’t but I would certainly want to look into that option. If not, I would put up some interesting results from the experiment (though if the choice is just a 1 hour solution or nothing then just put up a page in 1 hour) and link to commentary about the search and interesting things people found. This would be an interesting task for an intern, or someone else, and could provide an interesting and popular page. but most importantly at least not breaking 95,000 links (plus all those who go to the page from search results pages) is the minimum Google should do.

Related: web pages should live forever – Search Share Data Checking the ACSI – Ways for Google to Improve Continue reading →

Making Life Difficult for Customers

Posted on September 27, 2008  Comments (5)

Companies seem to think technology is an excuse to provide bad service. Or maybe they don’t need any excuse at all to do so, based on how often they provide bad service. My latest experience with lame pointy haired boss technology came while looking to watch a football game online. Years ago you could listen to any Wisconsin Badger game over the internet – very simple, no special software (just the simple free Real Audio plugin). In subsequent years (just to play a simple audio stream that had worked in previous years they kept requiring upgrades and their ever more complex required software would fail very often). Then the option of listen to online radio broadcasts disappeared altogether (for schools that chose to prevent this anyway).

Now sites that provide video seem incapable of making it a simple process. They chose not to use standard open software solutions. Instead they require you follow their desires to use this or that and then the whole operation fails quite often. Google, no surprise, is an exception (yes it worked prior to Google, they were just smart enough to buy it and not break it). YouTube just works. Can others copy this, idea? Some can, but many phbs decide that really everyone that uses their web sites should be happy to try and download special software and make configuration changes… to get their site working on their personal computers.

The idea that playing video online is solved problem and just making it more and more complex is not a good idea for users no matter if they want to add some bullet points to their boss on why they should get a larger raise this year because they got the engineers to add on some additional new feature that no-one actually wants. Granted This solved problem is a bit lame now, so I am all for improving it. But this should be a process that goes for simpler solutions, not more complex ones. And certainly any timed to the operating system of the end user is too idiotic to consider.
Continue reading →

Future Directions for Agile Management

Posted on August 25, 2008  Comments (4)

Agile management (agile software development specifically) is something that makes a big difference in my work life. David Anderson consistently provides great ideas on agile management and he does so again in this 90 minute presentation on the future directions for agile. As I learned about agile software development, what I saw was a great implementation of management improvement practices focused on software development that was very compatible with Deming’s management philosophy and lean thinking practices. The Agile manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

The first line can seem to be at odds, but I think in practice it is not – though I admit it may seem that way based on the importance placed on process by Deming (I think you have to read on agile to understand why this is the case). For my use of agile software develop, a highlight of the most important ideas is:

  • Deliver working systems quickly (with limited features, add features based on user needs) – [management improvement practice: PDSA, pilot ideas on a small scale, go to the gemba (don't sit in conference rooms talking about what might be an issue for the computer application you want to see in 6 months, create working systems and then continually improve it)]
  • Build systems that cope well with uncertainty and allow for constant continuous improvement of processes (with IT systems that can adjust as needed to changing business conditions and desires) – [continual improvement - what is good enough today is not good enough next year]

Important concepts addressed by agile management: highly collaborative, risk tolerance, systems thinking, customer interaction, craftsmanship ethic [joy in work], eliminate waste. Great quote from the webcast:

What we know about knowledge work, and software engineering, is that coordination cost grow non-linearly with batch size. We’ve known this since Greg Brooks published the Mythical Man Month, probably longer than that. So that is a key difference with manufacturing, coordination costs do not grow with batch size in manufacturing.

Related: Kanban In Software Engineering – Management Science for Software Engineering – Improving Communication – webcast of David Anderson talking about applying Agile and Deming’s ideas at Microsoft – What is Agile Software Development?

Gobbledygook

Posted on August 21, 2008  Comments (1)

How is this for Gobbledygook? Your home banking access code is expired! You must change your access code at this time. Your access code:

* may be between 4 and 20 characters in length
* must not have been changed within the last 0 days
* may not be one of 3 previously used access codes
* must not repeat the same character more than 0 times
* must not contain 0 characters from previous access code
* must contain at least 0 non-alphabetic character(s)
* may contain the following special characters: !”#$%&()+,-/;<=>?[\]^_`{|}*’
* must contain at least 0 alphabetic character(s)

1) What does “must not have been changed within the last 0 days” mean?
2) How about “must not repeat the same character more than 0 times” ?
3) Or “must not contain 0 characters from previous access code” ?

This kind of stuff is what makes people think computer programmers are crazy. I am sure the software allows users to set criteria. Then this screen is suppose to explain the criteria to users. It seems to me, if the selection is 0, then the correct procedure is to not display anything about it to the user.

Really I am not sure how “must not contain 0 characters from previous access code” is even to be applied if an positive integer were used. I guess you could not allow using any characters from the last access code, which seems crazy to me to begin with, but setting a number seems totally bizarre. I could see setting a requirement that says no repeat of the same sequence of x characters. I think that would probably not work well, but at least I understand what it would mean.

Related: Change Your Name – Bad Software Visual Controls – Complicating Simplicity – web usability resources – Schneier on Security

Don’t Do What Your Users Say

Posted on August 11, 2008  Comments (0)

In, Don’t do what your users say, Hanford Lemoore, provides a nice illustration of why customer focus is important but must be done with care.

in UI design it’s important to understand that what a user says and what a user is telling you can be two different things.
…
I got a good variety of comments back. Constructive thoughts. But I noticed an interesting trend: The most common thing suggested was “Add an undo to the game.” It seems almost everyone who tested the game had asked for an undo option.
…
I wanted to find the root cause of the “undo” request. I had some friends of mine host a playtest party at their house
…
During the party I got a lot of great feedback. Just watching someone play my game and see them learn from their mistakes was an incredible experience. But mainly I was watching closely to see if and why anyone was going to request an undo feature. What I saw was surprising.
…
After the user test is was clear to me that the root cause for undo requests was that the controls were too sensitive for the average player. There were a few other things that were revealed too. People really loved solving the puzzles in the game — the first time. But if they had to restart, they really did not enjoy redoing the puzzles they had already solved. This was another cause of wanting an undo in the game.

This is a great example of looking for the root cause and going to the gemba. You must focus on customers but you must bring thought into how you react. Just doing what they say is likely a bad idea. Ignoring them is also bad. But listening and learning and then adjusting is good.

Related: Pleasing Customers – Confusing Customer Focus – What Could we do Better? – Good Customer Service Example – Find the Root Cause

Not Exactly Lean Packaging

Posted on July 23, 2008  Comments (1)

HP shatters excessive packaging world record

Stephen said: “Imagine our excitement as we opened it, hoping against hope that it might contain a copy of some c-class virtual connect firmware that actually works.”

Sadly not. What the überbox did contain was 16 smaller boxes “which in turn [each] contained (wrapped in foam so they wouldn’t get broken) exactly two sheets of A4 paper”

It is hard to imagine what management system creates such solutions. But it is not hard to image Dilbert’s pointy haired boss fitting right in there.

Related: Is Poor Service the Industry Standard (HP)? – Muda/waste – Customers Get Dissed and Tell – Companies in Need of Customer Focus

Verizon Provides Lousy Service = Dog Bites Man

Posted on July 3, 2008  Comments (0)

It is obvious a few companies don’t have any ability to, provide even just reasonably bad service (for them the goal of decent service is so far away as to not be reasonable). How often do Verizon (based on their lousy track record I won’t get FIOS), Comcast, Time Warner, AT&T, United… get blasted for horrible custom service? So often it is not news. Still, the stories of their failures are written about over and over as they make so many people so mad some can’t help posting yet another story about the failures to value customers. Seth Godin is one recent example – Learning from frustration:

In this case, Verizon is acting like a monopoly (they’re not, at least not any more) and they are viewing customer interactions as an expense, not an investment.
…
So, I start by flipping this on its head. Verizon spends a fortune on advertising and outbound marketing. How much of that budget would they have to allocate/invest in order to turn their customer service into a discussion-worthy best in the world? Or at least enough to keep people from switching in disgust? Not much, it turns out.

Related: Dell, Reddit and Customer Focus – More Bad Customer Service Examples :-( – Customer Hostility from Discover Card – Is Bad Service the Industry Standard? – Ritz Carlton and Home Depot – Better and Different

  • Recent Trackbacks

  • Comments