Saturday, January 31, 2009

The Customer is always right (but rarely consulted)

In my work as a business analyst, I often find that the customers have pretty good insight into what needs to be done. The vendor, the IT people, and the man signing the cheques all have insight to offer, but the customer needs to be consulted.

Maybe this is why I find shopping so amazingly frustrating. I hate having my time wasted, I hate jumping through hoops that should never have existed, and I am surprised at how incredibly resistant many companies are to simply taking the hard earned money I try to give them.

Shopping carts
Studies have shown that a customer who is handed a basket upon entering a store will tend to purchase more, than a person who has to balance all their purchases in their hands. Enter the shopping cart. Studies also show that a 120lb lady managing 2 kids, rushing to prepare a fancy dinner for guests who are arriving in 3 hours, is 62% less likely to go postal and blow up the grocery store if you put a cart in her hand. One kid goes in here, another “helps” push, the groceries go in here, and she accomplishes her mission on time. Now if a shopping cart increases a customer’s spending while they are at the store, why would stores resist allowing customers to use the carts? I know it sounds crazy, but in my town (I’m sure this doesn’t happen elsewhere) some of the stores have actually “locked up” the carts. They force people to use a round “key”, actually a coin like a quarter or a “Loonie” (In Canada that is our 1 dollar coin) to unlock the cart. Yes you get your quarter or Loonie back, so it isn’t that they need the money from the cart rental… Someone suggested that it was to keep homeless people from taking the carts away. I reject this suggestion as nonsense because $0.25 is a pretty good price for a $180.00 shopping cart. Homeless folks can do math pretty good for the most part and that is an amazing deal. The only solution I can come up with is that the store doesn’t trust you to bring the cart back, and they don’t want to have to send their employee out to collect the cart. (Thanks for assuming that I’m lazy and self absorbed you corporate beancounters). They figure that they will charge you a $0.25-$1.00 cart return fee for not bringing your cart back. Because they know that a student working for $7/hour for 12 hours ($84 dollars) costs them far more than 500 customers who would have purchased one more $4 item ($2000) so you see here they have saved themselves -$1916 which makes the accountants proud because any time you can cut costs by a negative number that reduces revenue, and we all know that revenue is taxable. YECH! taxes.

So enter me… Credit card guy… I pay with my CC I don’t carry cash. NONE! I drive to the store, I get out I look for the carts, and see them lined up with shiny silver chains shackling them together… “Hey do you want me to spend money for 1 jug of milk or 4, because carrying 16 litres (5 gallons for my United Statesian friends) of milk in my arms is ridiculous”? So I do what any self-respecting person would do. I grab one of the carts with the baby seats on top, or one of the extra long kiddie carts that looks like a plastic truck with a shopping cart attached… (they don’t fit with the other carts so they can’t be locked together.)

OR

I go to another store like WALMART which does not lock up their carts because they are smart AND interested in my money. (this is not an endorsement of Walmart, I’ll criticize them for different insanity later).

OR

I go to customer service to learn that I can purchase a “key” to unlock the carts for $1. Now what is the point of letting me buy a key to unlock the carts? If it removes the $1 fee for me not returning the carts.

Ever get the sense that the carts are locked up because the cart salesman was on commission and just happened to be selling the cart locks as well? Let me finish this section on shopping carts with a reference to my favourite store to criticize (because it is so easy). Stupid Store typically has their carts located half way through the parking lot. (half way from the road to the store-front) The really smart people in the crowd will realize that this is a dumb idea because it forces people with “good” parking spots (like the folks in the disabled parking spots) to walk out to the middle of the parking lot to get a cart, which they must then push past their car to the store. After shopping, they drop their groceries at their car, and then walk to the middle of the parking lot to get their $0.25 back, and then walk back to their car to leave. In my town Stupid Store built parking under the store (they built the store higher) which I must admit is a really GOOD IDEA because it reduces the footprint of the store and parking lot, and protects the people and cars from the rain we “enjoy” 6 months out of the year here on the West Coast. So the shoppers have to walk under the store (if they parked out in the front lot), pay their money, and push the cart up a ramp which changes direction half way up.

Cluttered Messy Impassible Aisles
It is comforting to think I am smart, to come up with an idea that most people don’t come up with and to benefit from this. Like realizing that walmart closes at 10PM and starting my shopping at 9:30 because most people have left the store and I can FLY through my shopping.

Except in the evenings at Walmart a funny thing happens. Pallet Jacks (wheeled contraptions for moving wooden pallets loaded with every thing from M&Ms to Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs.) start dumping pallets of product in the aisles as if to begin the transformation of the Walmart store into a warehouse overnight. It is irritating to head into an aisle only to find the exit from that aisle blocked with a pallet (reverse….) but that really isn’t so bad, we keep getting told that everything Walmart does is so that they can offer us low prices (which allows people in sweatshops to enjoy a higher standard of living?).

If you’ve ever been in a new Walmart store and then revisited that store 2 years later you will notice a significant difference in the level of clutter visible in the store. The Aisles are designed to be wide and easily navigated (like the nice aisles in the Target in Bellingham Washington). The aisles have different flooring or painted stripes at the side to clearly indicate where the aisle starts, so it isn’t that the store managers have become confused about where the products should be displayed. It appears to be intentional. Walmart managers or VPs or whoever look at those wide clean uncluttered aisles, and they don’t see happy shoppers free to pass without a micro-traffic jam, they see lost retail space. So rather than making the Aisles narrower, they insert “displays” in the centre of the aisles creating 2 narrower aisles with equally narrow spaces between the displays. What this creates is rows of shoppers pushing carts who can’t see other shoppers nearby (the displays typically extend above eye height). With all the little spaces between the aisles, customers start behaving like they would in traffic, they turn, they merge, they make U-turns, they park in the traffic lane etc. So Walmart regains some precious retail space, and Walmart shoppers regain the traffic headache they had before arriving at the store. They can have traffic headaches outside AND inside the store.

What was otherwise destined to be a pleasant spacious shopping layout, now in atmosphere headed slightly closer towards most dollar stores in terms of cluttered crammed aisles. Congratulations you Walmart bean counters, you’ve taken a great layout and converted it into a mediocre layout. Which probably isn’t actually as frustrating as trying to pay for your purchases at the checkout.

Take my money take my wallet take my credit cards
This phrase is normally associated with an armed robbery where a person wisely decides to let a thief take over his credit card debt rather than risk personal injury. It is also a phrase I’ve found myself (almost) saying while in line to pay for “goods and services” at Walmart and other establishments. Near the place where I work there is a restaurant named WhiteSpot. (previously cleanliness was a value, but the name stuck) We have on occasion attempted to celebrate someone’s birthday or other occasion at this restaurant. Sure the food takes a while to come, but it is ok and we eat it happily enough, what comes next is where the real pain is. Paying can take 15-25 minutes as people queue up with credit cards in hand and servers are hunted down to provide “guest cheques” and impatient overfed diners try to give the business their money. Now if you are as hard working as me, you feel a bit uncomfortable taking an hour for lunch with the entire office, much preferring to munch something from a brown paper bag that allows you to only take 30 minutes for lunch. But after taking 1 hour for lunch, to be forced to stand around for another quarter hour before being permitted to pay for your lunch is ludicrous. Anyone who has run a business or taken a first level business course will tell you about the business cycle, and how the ultimate goal of the exercise is to collect money from the customer you have served. But there you go, they know you won’t run away without paying (the police eat there too). You are stuck with their food in your gut, and you are on the hook. The “girl” keeps wandering away and talking to people and the line of people shifting from one foot to the next with their Credit Cards in hand, sigh and “act Canadian”, and try best to pass the time by thinking up reasonable explanations for their absence from their desks. “We were on a corporate teambuilding experience requiring both stamina and professional conduct… We were… trying to give an unwilling business owner our money”

What the silly WhiteSpot people don’t realize (in their foolish ignorance of what is important to a professional during a lunch hour), is that they have missed out on many many lunches since that time. (at $10 each with 20 people, easily they have missed $600 in sales from our department alone, and I don’t eat out very much!). All for the sake of saying “Suzy, stand here. do not move. Take peoples’ money very quickly so they can leave and other people can have their seats.”

So there you go. oversimplified maybe, but it would seem that there is no end to the apparent shorsightedness of businesses in the interactions they have with their customers.

Menu board madness (AKA: Can I take your order)
I like eating at Wendys because the burgers don’t taste as fat and the vegetables (while anemic looking) are fresh. I’ll order 2 bacon cheesburgers and a water and I’ve come away with an affordable experience I’m willing to repeat almost indefinately (if I wasn’t determined to not eat fast food very often). Last week, we were going bananas with our kids and I decided to treat my wife to “not having to prepare lunch” we pull up at Wendys and look at the menu board (you already know what I’m going to order I’m a creature of habit). The menu board is located right at the speaker where you place your order (-1 point for Wendys) , so the girl tells us she will be with us (1 point for Wendys). Now we are sitting there looking at the options, the pictures, the deals, the fries, the drinks, the prices. We continue browsing the menu as the line of cars grows behind us and we notice that there are 2 prices for Meal #8 (-1 point for Wendys). So I order Meal #8 for my wife and insist on the lower price. The “girl” tells me that the computer says I’m wrong. (Did I mention that I build information systems for a living). I finish ordering and pull up to the window to inform them of the problem with their sign. I’m handed a dime because the computer’s price can’t be changed (0 points for Wendys). We get our food and we pull away.

The mistake on the signboard is easy enough to make if you are posting items in multiple locations (do you think that speeds up customers reading your board, or slows them down?) What bothered me is the entire time I’m finding the food items on the board that I want to order for my family, there is a polite line of cars growing behind me. I’m Canadian, we are programmed to feel bad if we make somebody wait longer because of us. The menu board should have been repeated several times prior to the point where we ordered. (we had to sit behind another car which was ordering ahead of us).

Well I’m pretty sure I won’t make it through another shopping trip without something else to contribute to this article, but I’ll post it. Maybe you’ll smile and laugh at these scenarios, or maybe you run a business and can avoid irritating your customers by remembering my experiences. At any rate enjoy. I wonder if I should start offering retail customer experience consulting, because somebody certainly needs to be doing that.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

From Idea To Plan to Completion balancing team formation

I’ve been learning about balance lately in a highly colaborative workplace.  In this environment people come together to determine plans.




I’ve seem Kick-off meetings that attempted to involve everyone degenerate into chaos, I’ve seen well run teams conduct research around problems and solutions and then in the end no real change.  I’ve seen the talkers wandering from office to office selling their version of history and sometimes with great impact.

Can you develop an idea without doing some research.

Can you research an idea without approaching people for their expertise and explaining your idea.

In explaining and having people question how your activities will affect them, how do you explain if you don’t yet have a plan.  (You are still doing research right?)

So you get some information and you start converting your idea into a plan.

If you do have a plan, how do you avoid the impression that you have come up with a wonderful plan for their life without consulting them.

If you consult them, how are you going to balance their interests with the interests of others.

When do you involve people with a project, early enough so that they have a sense of ownership and buy-in, and so that you can benefit from their insights, but not too early so that their confusion poisons the vision for the project.  To early and you have chaos. Too late and you surprise people and they react. (people like surprises, but only for Christmas)

There seems to be a lot of rhetoric tied up in deciding when to involve people.  We’ve all see the projects that stretch on for an eternity and at the end we learn that almost the entire organization was at some point consulted, but in the end the result doesn’t really fit with the desires of the people listed as participants.  We hear about transparency, which seems to imply that you can’t have a meeting without inviting everyone.  We hear about vision and direction and goals, which usually means you missed the last meeting when everything was decided.

There are the pre-meetings before the meeting so that the people with goals can get everybody on side for the meeting and there are the post meeting where the misunderstandings get hammered out in the corridor safely away from where the meeting minutes might capture the insights that dispelled the confusion.

There are the shadow meeting which we all suspect must be taking place because half of the meeting participants are using words as if they had special meanings that had been hammered out previously. (Am I the only one who doesn’t think that makes logical sense?  Why is everyone sitting there smiling at me as if they knew something I don’t?)

For me respect is a big part of meetings.  I not only want to get to consensus, to hammer out issues and get to the root of problems, to get decisions on solutions or directions, I want to be building relationship with the people I meet.  I want to have a stronger connection with them the next time we meet.  A bridge that can carry more weight which, if required can bear the load of some ambiguity or confusion until it can be cleared up.

What are your thoughts about how soon is too soon to involve stakeholders in your meetings?

Saturday, January 24, 2009

Some energy efficiency is spending dollars to save pennies.



Our local electricity provider has been running “power smart” adds where strangers suddenly appear in your home or office cheering when you turn out the light as you leave the room, or as you turn off the powerbar to your computer.  The message is that you should be encouraged for such conservation.  I have in the past mindlessly accepted the idea behind these ads as valid, since I have for my adult life turned out the lights I'm not using, but recently I’m coming to question some of what I'm hearing.

Sometimes you might leave a light on for a feeling of security, or if you were to turn off the powerbar, your appliances might lose track of the date or time.  So there are valid reasons for leaving these on when you are not using them.

In TV-Land, all the switches and powerbars are easy to reach (although ugly lying on the desk etc).  In my life I don’t have VERY convenient powerbars, and am more likely to have to reach behind your appliances to find the power bars to turn them on and off (shock hazzard from loose plugs you can’t see clearly is so remote I won’t address that at all).  So the activity isn’t as free as it appears in the ads.  It costs me something.  Convenience (when the remote controls can’t make the appliance wake up), time (running around the house turning things off as I leave).  There is a cost to me.  The concept of power leaches or vampires, that suck a tiny amount of energy constantly has been a popular topic in the press in 2008.

Additionally there have been a number of ads about replacing my old inefficient refrigerator with a new energy smart refrigerator.  I’ve realized that I need to do some research on my own.  What is the cost and what is the benefit to me to the utility and to the environment.

Now I am the kind of guy who turns the VCR or TV off when I’m not actively using them. The lights all go out at night (with the exception of the 0.3Watt LED night lights in the halls).  I turn off lights I’m not using, but I installed the lights so they could be used.  They work for me, not the other way around.   So with a heart that wants to conserve and show my thankfulness through not wasting what I’ve been given, I wanted to know where we were wasting energy.  I purchased a $17 (blue planet?) meter from my local hardware store that can show the Amps, Watts and Volts being used by an appliance in real-time.  Additionally it can log the electricity usage, showing you the total Kilo Watt Hours (KWH) consumed by the appliance over a period of many days.  After you enter the cost of electricity ($0.072 / KWH here) into the meter, it can tell you the dollar cost of your appliance for the time it has been plugged in.  I started making discoveries:

computer / adsl modem / router / UPS / printer : $0.25 / day

Old inefficient refrigerator from the last decade: $0.40 / day

TV / VCR / video game / stereo: $0.10 / day

Laptop computer: $0.05 / day

Microwave:  $0.02 / day

So this causes me to think carefully about what I’m hearing and being told.  I’m being told to switch off the power bar for my TV etc, when the use of the devices is only $0.30 / day.  So conceivably I might save 1 or 2 cents there.  Hardly worth the time is it?  Could I pay you a penny to stop doing what you are doing and spend 10 seconds coming over here and flipping this switch?  If you were paid $20/hour, that is 5.5 cents per 10 seconds.  Now its true, if you have nothing else to do it wouldn’t hurt for you to spend your spare time doing this, but the benefit seems really really minute compared to the cost?  Why is your utility spending $100,000s on this advertising?

My understanding of the issue is that it comes down to capacity.  If they need to build another power plant that is exceedingly expensive, but if they can continue to sell power from the existing power plants, that is a much more reasonable proposition for them.  The issue is nothing if we are talking about you saving $0.01 of electricity for flipping off the power bar.  The issue is really only significant thanks to the power of multiplication.  If you can convince 5,000,000 people to save that much electricity, you just saved $50,000 of electricity per day.  So the impact to your utility is huge, but the savings for you as an individual user of electricity is essentially nothing.

Now how about that refrigerator.  $0.40 per day to keep my food from spoiling seems like a good deal to me.  I don’t have to go down into a cellar, I don’t have to drop my food down a well, or deal with bricks of ice, or food poisoning.  I think it is a bargain.  Through my study of the new energy efficient fridges on the market it appears that the new fridges would use half the electricity per day.  Over the course of a year that would save me $73 in electricity.  However a new fridge costs around $800 (depending on what you buy).  So it would take me 10 years for the fridge’s energy savings to pay for the fridge.  I don’t know about you, but with the quality of manufactured goods dropping, I’m not sure I would expect my new fridge to last me 10 years.  This old fridge on the other hand, continues to work and looks after the food just fine.  So the marketting says “buy a new energy smart fridge”.  To do that, somebody needs to manufacture the fridge with all its glass and plastic and metal and compressors and chemicals and foam.  Then they need to ship it across the country or around the world, advertise it, house it in a store, get it here, and dump my old fridge in a landfill or recycling depot (landfill that sells metal).  It seems to me that the most environmentally responsible thing I can do is to make my existing appliances last as long as I can. 

So suffice it to say that the meter has probably paid for itself in debunking “new appliance savings” and in giving me some peace of mind about the little power leaches plugged in at my house.

 I am happy to say that we enjoy the light provided by the current generation of Compact Flourescent light bulbs (CFL)s  Instead of 100W we use 50W of light over our sink.  Instead of 160W we use 44W in our bathroom. The list goes on of the places we have installed these.  The hallway light behind me, the lamp in the corner.  They aren’t the best light for all situations, but we know that the 33W we are using right now beats the 150W we would have had otherwise.  To my mind this is a very smart energy saving, because apart from purchasing the bulbs initially, there is no incremental cost to turning on a CFL over a standard incandescent light.  It just saves me money and saves us all power without inconveniencing me or introducing an additional cost.

We need to take a very strong stand against “GreenWash” in all its forms.  Keep your brain engaged as you are urged to do this or to do that to save the planet.  Among the genuinely good information there is certainly hype that is designed to pad someone elses wallet at the expense of your own.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Quality through continual refinement



In improving Quality, continual improvement through the practice of incremental refinement is a powerful approach.

For example, as I drive home I have a route that works quite well. It is the most direct path between two points or the fastest path between two points. As I go along I start to notice things. Hey, people are turning off here, I wonder why or hey, Google disagrees with me and thinks it knows it better route. (Google maps that is, Google doesn’t talk to me yet…) Or hey, I wonder where that road goes it comes out at an intersection and looks busier than the road I took previously. Through experience we don’t become experts at driving down new roads but we become experts driving down the roads that we know. So with each opportunity to observe a contrary point of view each opportunity to experience the effect of plans. We are in a position to improve and to do better.

I believe in continual refinement. Let’s draft a document, present it to some other knowledgeable people and have them critique it. Then lets present it to our customers and have them shoot it full of holes. After each critique and review, we see problems and we fix them, so it becomes better and better and better until we have a really good document. The alternative is to try and get things perfect before we benefit from the insight and correction we might be offered. Producing PERFECT work is the realm of those who fear that the customer will discover they are not perfect.  In producing PERFECT work (which is really just unreviewed work) Those doing the writing will tend to overthink second guess and overcorrect the work in the hopes that it will not fail, this extra “dilligence” will result in an increased cost that may or may not pay off in acceptance by the customer.

So, let’s put it out so the customers can test it.  Every time the work encounters a problem, we hear about it and we’re able to improve our documentation. Things that we anticipated would be a problem, are not.  However those that we never would have anticipated become problems. We let our customers help us achieve quality through continual and repeated refinement.

In the case of a business process that is being refined, where incremental change is possible (and it isn’t always) staff experience less disruption, maintain more productivity and generally experience less stress caused by change.

Some customers I worked with had been drafting some webpages which would represent their department and department’s initiatives.  They had these pages in draft form for 3 years, during which time, none of their customers could read the information they had been thoughtfully compiling.  The information by that point, ironically was out of date and would require updating.  Their desire to get the information absolutely perfect had effectively removed the entire benefit of compiling the information in the first place.

Often in the IT environment where I work, we wrestle with the need for information that should be documeted, but which has not been. Even if we had partial information, outdated information, or incorrect information that would be preferable to NO INFORMATION.  At least partial information gives you a place to start. A contact, a server name, a vendor’s 1800 number.  So I am through my experience a fan of work that is created imperfect, and then refined as opportunity presents itself. 

Well, this document has been sitting in draft for a while, so I’m going to kick it out there.  Maybe though it it incomplete, it will be of some benefit.  Let me know what you think, and I’ll improve it as we go.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

The Green Tree



Since 2002 I’ve been running this micro ISV (independent software vendor) and I’ve really enjoyed working with some great customers over the years.  In the current season, I’m taking stock of my life and auditing where I spend my time.  My small children and my wife deserve the bulk of my non-working hours, and that has never been up for debate.  Children however grow up and become more social and require more direct attention.  I’m making sure my kids get that from me, and adjusting the way that I work with GreenTree to accomodate that. 

One way that I have been attempting to honour my customers for the last 6 years is by filling in the gaps myself.  Where a customer has requested A and B, but really those don’t make sense without C, I’ve built C for them at no cost.  Where a customer has asked for a feature that requires massive re-working, I’ve shared the cost of that re-working with them.  So while they have seen some of the costs of customizing software, they have not had seen the whole cost.  I however had seen that hidden cost, often working unseen late into the evenings only to get up early the next morning for work.   So I’ve attempted recently to restore balance and cut out the overwork.

In order for my family or my business to be healthy, I must be healthy.  A tree providing shade to animals, soil retention to the land, and purification for the air, must be thriving.   I see that now, and I’m ready for this next season of re-focussing and prioritizing, of Auditing my life.  I am the green tree.

Greg.