jump to navigation

Fight The Power! August 10, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings.
Tags: ,
add a comment

They’re gone.  The S.O.S Pads are gone.

I was food shopping Sunday afternoon, dutifully traversing the aisles, expecting everything to be in its place.  I know that this expectation is not always met, as devious marketers move things in an effort to break my concentration and tempt me with new and exciting products.  On rare occasions, the entire store gets reconfigured, just to shake things up and keep customers off-balance.

This was different.  All the other kitchen cleaning products were in their places, but the S.O.S Pads were gone.  Not sold out, not moved slightly, but completely removed.  I looked for the shelf tag that should mark their familiar home, but none could be found.  Had then been shifted to a whole new store neighborhood?  Perhaps they were no longer considered a kitchen cleaning tool, but had been shifted to the skimpy kitchen/hardware/automotive section as a garage accessory.  Hard to imagine, but the mind of the store layout person is difficult to plumb at times.

Instead of wandering the store in a Sisyphean search, I went right to the manager and asked where they were.

“Oh, we don’t carry them anymore.”

“At any store?”

“Nope.  When they reset that display, the pads were not included.”

I walked away, rendered mute by another example of corporate grocery incompetence.  In one fell swoop, some drone within the depths of Harris Teeter had eliminated 91 years of product history, removing a product as American as Corn Flakes or Wonder Bread from the shelves.  How could this be?  Have people suddenly stopped scouring things?  Is there insufficient margin on steel wool and soap to justify their sale?  Or have S.O.S Pads been found to be environmentally unacceptable?

Surely it cannot be the latter.  After all, on the same shelf that used to contain the Pads are environmentally safe quick-dissolving dishwasher detergent pouches.  Honestly, if you are concerned about the environment enough to fret about the safety of the dissolving pouch that contains the detergent, wouldn’t you have long ago sworn off automatic dishwashers and reverted back to eating off hardened disks of week-old bread to ensure a completely carbon-neutral eating and washing experience?

In this case, I suspect a bad decision by a powerful committee. A committee that holds our fate in its hands, deciding with the stroke of a pen how we will clean our pots and pans.  Are we going to put up with this?  Are we going to allow The Man to decide how we scrub and wash?  Or are we going to stand up and fight this injustice?

I will fight.  I will go to the Harris Teeter web site and lodge a formal complaint.  As hundreds and thousands of others do the same, our voices will be heard and S.O.S Pads will be returned to the shelves.  A great tradition of shiny American cookware will not be interrupted by petty bureaucracy.

Are you with me?  Let’s hear it: Scour To The People!

Slices Of Apple, Part 4 August 7, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

This is the last in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Avoid Denial

It appears that Steve Jobs has been reading these blog postings and taking my advice to heart.  Although he has not contacted me directly, he clearly agrees with my assessment of his recent misfortunes.  And, visionary that he is, he has actually started to act upon the advice I’m about to share, even before I posted it to this blog.

That guidance is simple: when you are having some sort of systems or project meltdown, own up to it.  The sooner you step up and take responsibility for the problem, the sooner you can move forward with fixing things.  The existence of the problem is not up for debate; if your users think you have a problem, you have a problem.  As I learned from my first boss in computer operations, the customer’s perception is your reality.  Accept that reality and deal with it.

In Apple’s case, their initial reluctance to admit that they were fallible only damaged their credibility even further.  They then began to split hairs: the MobileMe meltdown only affected 1, or 2, or 4 percent of the user base.  If you are among those 80,000 people, your perception is that it is affecting 100 percent of the users that matter. Offering statistical analysis of a problem is not a useful approach.  Apple is in a hole, and the rule of holes is simple: when you are in one, stop digging.

Given the lightning speed with which this all gets transmitted by the internet, Apple’s repeated refusal to acknowledge their customer’s reality only compounded things that much quicker.  Perhaps a general extension of the “avoid denial” rule would be “especially when your users are well-organized and digitally connected.”

Even with Steve’s “leaked” email, Apple is still in a bit of denial.  His email was sent to employees, not customers.  While there is no doubt that employees are getting hammered from within and without, the only people that really matter are the customers.  These people paid $99 for a service that doesn’t work.  To bring closure to the bad rollout and to move on to actually fixing it, Steve Jobs needs to apologize to his customers, publicly and sincerely.  Only then can he hope to rebuild the fractures that have resulted from his poor planning and execution.

I hope he’s still reading.

Slices Of Apple, Part 3 July 30, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: , ,
add a comment

This is the third in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Time, Quality, or Money: Choose Two

I am always surprised when I meet IT folks who don’t know this old canard.  Simply put, in any project something will be sacrificed.  If you want a high-quality result on time, you’ll spend a lot of money to get it.  Want to hit your budget and deliver high quality?  You’ll take longer with fewer people to get things finished. And if you want to hit your date and hit your budget, you’ll never meet your quality goal.

Apparently, this is the choice that Apple made for MobileMe, the new shared email service launched along with the iPhone 3G earlier this month.  After making the bad decision to release four big things all at once, Apple seems to have stuck with that decision without regard to the quality of the MobileMe product.  The fallout has been terrible and Apple has lost face with a huge swath of its customer base.  The problems still aren’t fixed, and users are still (rightfully) upset, as witnessed by the FailMe parody web site.

The key to successful project management is to realize that this rule is inviolate.  When a project goes awry (and they all do, to some extent), you will be choosing two of these three goals.  How to decide?

If possible, choose Time. Money may be limited, and quality is crucial, so delaying a project and slipping a date is your least distasteful choice.  If you are managing a project whose date cannot slip (end of year reporting or tax filing, for example), recognize that constraint right away and budget lots of money to ensure that you will wind up with good quality.  A good product delivered late is still a good product; a bad product delivered on time will never be forgotten.  Apple will be hearing about MobileMe for a long time; slipping it would have been no big deal.

If you can’t choose Time, choose Money. Money buys labor in the form of developers, testers, tools, and anything else you might need to hit that date.  The goal is to ensure that you avoid having to choose quality.  Be careful, though: money only goes so far.  At some point, you cannot buy your way to hit a date.  (There is a closely correlated rule for this: Nine Women Cannot Have A Baby In One Month).

Never choose Quality. If you really have to choose Quality, argue strenuously to cancel, defer, or redefine the project.  Like eating bad food, memories of bad quality linger for a long, long time.  Slipped dates are soon forgotten as people move on to other things, and even blown budgets fade after time.  Bad quality never diminishes and can come back to haunt you over and over again.

In short, make rational decisions on Money and Time, but never give in on Quality.  If you cave in on Quality, you’ll soon find yourself living through Musciano’s Extension to this rule:

Time, Quality, Money, or Your Job: Choose Three

In these cases, you usually aren’t the one making the final choice.

Slices Of Apple, Part 2 July 28, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: ,
add a comment

This is the second in a series of posts dissecting Apple’s recent misfortunes during the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  You’ll find the first post here.

Turn One Knob At A Time

Divide and conquer.  Divide and conquer.  Divide and conquer.  This mantra, more than any other, must be burned into the brain of anyone hoping to make a career of IT.  Break big jobs into small jobs, deliver on the small jobs, and the big jobs will solve themselves.  Very few projects cannot be divided into sequences of interdependent smaller projects that, in turn, are easier to understand and complete.

Although Apple committed many errors in the iPhone deployment, they can all be traced to breaking this fundamental rule.  In one day, Apple launched the new iPhone 3G, a new matching version of iTunes with the new Apps store, a corresponding firmware update for the iPod Touch, and a replacement for the .Mac service called MobileMe.  Any one of these launches is a big event, bringing significant value to new and existing customers.  Each is fraught with peril if things don’t go well.  Tackling one or two would be a big deal; tackling all four was a mistake.  Apple’s hubris, I suspect, made them think they could pull this off.  They were wrong.

From the comfort of my Monday Morning Quarterback Chair, here’s how I would have scheduled this rollout:

  • Launch with the iPhone 3G, along with the new version of iTunes, but without the App store going live.  Instead, put a teaser link in iTunes to get people salivating over all the wonderful new apps that are just a few days away.  People will be so excited over the new iPhone that they won’t care that the apps aren’t yet available.  Apple servers cannot keep up with all that phone provisioning anyway; why burden them with additional traffic as people look for new apps for their phone?
  • Allow the phone rollout to stabilize over a period of two weeks.  Apologize for the provisioning problems with some comment that emphasizes how hard it is to predict demand with such an insanely popular phone.  Let the press write glowing reviews on the virtues of 3G speed and the business connectivity in the phone.
  • After two weeks, announce the fabulous new App Store.  People that have just gotten a bit bored with their fast 3G access on their phone will now go crazy all over again, downloading and trying out apps.  This is the lowest-risk step of the bunch, since most of the app problems are related back to the authors, not Apple.
  • If the iPhone is stable at this point, release the firmware upgrade for the iPod Touch.  If not, wait for the bugs to get fixed and slip the release for a future date.  If things are going smoothly, you’ll be quieting the revolt among Touch owners who desperately want those new apps and features.  If the firmware is buggy, you’ve saved yourself calls from another class of irate users.
  • Finally, hold off on MobileMe for however long it takes to fix it.  This product, among all these releases, is clearly not ready for primetime and is a real black eye for Apple.

In the end, you must understand and slightly exceed your users’ expectations.  No one in the user community was demanding a new phone, and new firmware, and new apps, and new iTunes, and MobileMe all on the same day.  Why try?  Any experienced IT professional could tell you this plan was bound to fail. In every rollout, something goes wrong.  And when one thing falls over, it’s bound to tip over lots of other dominoes behind it, resulting in an avalanche of problems.  If you set up fewer dominoes to begin with, you increase your odds of success.  If you have to turn a bunch of knobs on something, turn just one knob at a time!

Slices Of Apple, Part 1 July 27, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
Tags: ,
add a comment

I beat up on Microsoft a lot (and offer praise when it is justified). In the spirit of fairness, it’s Apple’s turn, given the absolute debacle of the rollout of the iPhone 3G and related technologies.  It’s a great case study for CIOs, developers, and just about every IT person in between. Over the next few days, I’ll be extracting some lessons to be learned from Apple’s ongoing woes.

Stay Humble

Pride goes before destruction,
a haughty spirit before a fall. -Proverbs 16:18

Before dissecting the specifics of Apple’s problems, it’s important to note that they set themselves up for all the scorn and criticism they are now getting.  Apple has spent years poking at Microsoft, using every failure to highlight how great and infallible Apple products are.  Bug-free, easy to use, simple to configure, and secure, Apple has people believing that their systems and software are somehow different from every other piece of software out there.  When Apple products fail, people are astoundingly forgiving. A similar failure from a Microsoft product yields everything but torch-lit marches on Redmond. Somehow, Apple is just too cool to be wrong.

When things began to unravel, you couldn’t help but be amused as the problems began to pile up during the iPhone rollout.  For anyone who has lived through a less-than-perfect deployment of any system, big or small, it was somehow reassuring to see Apple struggle just like the rest of us.  In the end, software is software, and poor execution yields lousy results, no matter who runs the company or how fanatical the customer base becomes.

The most damaging aspect of all this is that, for the first time, Apple’s shiny reputation has been tarnished outside of the IT community.  Nerds can recount problems with Apple OS releases and other odd product failures, but for the mass of mortals who use iPods and iPhones, their infallible technology provider has stumbled, revealed to be just another purveyor of buggy, poorly tested software.  Apple couldn’t always live up to its over-hyped reputation, and that day of reckoning has finally come due.  The cost of that slip, given their previous arrogance, will be huge.

The lesson to be learned is simple: stay humble.  No matter how good your track record, you are just one project away from a similar disaster.  Lose focus for one minute and you’ll be digging out from a pile of problems.  The price of great IT execution is eternal vigilance.  No one, at any level, ever gets to let up, slip up, or give up.

When things go well, be thankful, show your appreciation to those who really enabled the success, and don’t let it go to your head.  That way, when things go poorly (and sooner or later, they will) you won’t have people rooting against you if only to reward your ego and arrogance. That’s one lesson from Apple that applies not only to project management, but to every aspect of life.