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Coping With Change December 22, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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In days gone by, cashiers gave change by counting up.  Starting from the purchase amount, you received pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters until a whole dollar amount was reached.  You then got ones, fives, tens, and twenties to complete your change.  Cashiers invariably counted as they disbursed the money, so you could check to make sure it was correct.  In the end, you had change in your hand, topped by bills, in order.  You could hold on to the change while you put the bills away, and then put the change in your pocket or purse.  Simple, straightforward, easy.

Not anymore.  Having eliminated basic math from the skill set of modern cashiers, the register point-of-sale terminal now computes the change, leaving the cashier to withdraw that much money from the drawer and dump it in your hand.  You get handed bills first, followed by a pile of change, followed by the receipt, followed by the bag.  This clumsy arrangement is impossible to deal with easily.  You wind up letting go of the bag, dumping the change in your free hand, shuffling the bills, and then putting away the change.  To make things worse, the cashier instantly begins handling the next customer’s purchases, giving you the bum’s rush while you fumble with a wad of paper and coins.

One solution is to dump the whole mess on the counter and sort it out, annoying everyone in line.  A better solution would involve the cashier being trained to give you the change in a way that makes it easy for you, not easy for the cashier.

So much of everything we do involves working with our customers in ways that make sense to them and help them be productive.  From complicated user interfaces to the simple act of making change, every customer interaction counts.  Worst of all, the annoyance of getting your change dumped in your hand is your last experience as you exit the store, leaving you with a bad experience to savor as you walk to your car.  What a great way to encourage customers to return!

How do your systems stack up?  Do you give customers change in ways that make it easy to work with you?  Or do you leave them annoyed and irritated as they walk out your door?

Dealing With Goldilocks December 19, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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Recently, my wife’s car wouldn’t start.  Drawing on my deep technical acumen, I jump-started the car and took it to a local repair shop.  They agreed with my diagnosis of a bad battery, but to be sure, they wanted to test my battery with their special equipment.  This would ensure that the battery was the culprit, keeping me from wasting my money when the problem might lie elsewhere.  They would even provide me with the diagnostic printout showing the exact problem.

I hate getting car repairs, and this kind of customer service was pleasantly unexpected.  After a little while, the technician returned with the promised printout.  Along with the date and time, the printout provided this complete technical analysis of my battery:

REPLACE BATTERY

Wow! With this kind of detailed analysis, it was clear that my $130 would be well-spent.

Where were the voltages and amps?  Where was the graphical display of the cells in the battery, with one or two in red?  Where was some sort of chart, showing how quickly the battery would charge and then die?  Where was the link to the online version of the report that I could view years from now? How about a special code I could text to a server, or a Twitter stream for my car?

Clearly, my expectations of the diagnostic report were very different from what the vendor provided.  And in the mechanic’s defense, many customers need only see that printed confirmation to verify their battery suspicions.  Volts and amps don’t mean much to most people.

Every customer is Goldilocks: they don’t it want it too hot, or too cold.  They want it just right.  As technology designers, we struggle constantly to anticipate “just right” and deliver it quickly and reliably.  But we rarely get it right, because every user has a different definition of “just right.”

What to do?  Personalization may be the answer, but can be cumbersome and very expensive to implement.  Presenting progressively detailed data can help, allowing users to dig in deeper as their interests dictate.  Even offering a few versions of a report or interface (beginner, experienced, and expert) can mitigate a lot of user complaints.

Although it is difficult, we cannot give up on finding the sweet spot for our users.  Because if we do, we may find that one day our boss shows up with a diagnostic report of their own:

REPLACE CIO

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Talk The Talk? Talk Their Talk! December 17, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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We say it over and over, but it still bears repeating: IT must speak to the business in their language, not ours.  We are most effective when we embrace and understand the culture of our customers, and that starts with communicating in the terms they understand.

At the highest levels, CIOs must deal with the business as a strategic partner.  This means living in the world of finance, operations, and process.  In any general conversation between a CIO and a business peer, specific technology terms should be few and far between.  In the end, the business does not care about our geeky little world.  They only care about what we deliver and how it helps them.

But the advice to “talk their talk” extends across all levels of our organizations.  I was reminded of this recently when a published project status confused our business partners.  We were closing out a project that updated several thousand PCs on our network.  We had completed the updates but ran a special audit job to make sure nothing was missed.  The update was complete but the audit was only half-done.  The project status noted that 700 or so PCs remained to be processed in this last phase of the project.

The business perceived this to mean that all these machines were not even updated and got concerned about the project.  It took a day of poking around to figure out the real answer and reassure the business.  Had we expressed the status in language that made sense to the business, the distinction between the update and the audit would have been clear and the confusion avoided.

Those of us in IT often use the language of technology to either impress or confuse our customers.  This never helps in the long run, although it lets you get away with a lot in the short term.  In the end, another old adage holds true in our world: People don’t care what you know.  They want to know that you care. And that starts by speaking to people in a language that they understand.

Slices Of Apple, Part 4 August 7, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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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 2 July 28, 2008

Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.
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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!