dancingmango

On Saturday I attended the Hong Kong BarCamp.  This was the first Barcamp I have attended and it blew me away.  Here were 200-odd people, brought together on their own volition to share and learn.

 On-line communities are easy to subscribe to, requiring minimal effort to participate.  Being physically present requires more commitment and effort.  The content, as typical of Barcamps, was generally technical.  It asks the question, is there something inherently social and altruistic about being a geek?  Do other industry horizontals have such a rich picking of community events?  Could there be an accountancy barcamp, or a marketing barcamp?  And what about the verticals?  Could there be a banking barcamp? And what about collaboration on projects for the common good?  Geeks get together to opensource.  When will the (to pick on a vertical) accountants get together to build an opensource offering?

The <enter time period> ends and a retrospective is held.  The team writes on Post-It notes things that are important to them and they get stuck up on the wall.  And maybe they get grouped into similar topics or themes.  And then the team vote on them; the topic that has the most votes is the one the group talks about first…. and they talk about that topic at length.  (If you were to analyse the signal to noise ratio of the first topic discussed compared with the last topic discussed, you’d find significantly more noise when you start).  Actions to resolve the issues are finally addressed and identified.  The team then move on to the next topic and so on until all the topics that had votes against them are done.  And it’s been a marathon session and we are done.

But what about the topics that no-one voted on?  What about the post-it that sits alone?  It was important enough for someone to have written it.  No votes, no priority,  no discussion, no action.  Yet mining it might have  delivered a diamond action.

I don’t care much for voting in retrospectives.  It’s not a particularly efficient way of doing things.  For one because the actual process of voting takes up valuable time.  Then by the time the issue with the fewest votes comes up, the energy in the room is drained and the discussion is rushed.  So why not do away with the voting, and introduce strict time management to the retrospective discussion.  Allow five minutes to each topic.  Use a stop watch to enforce this.  This will allow all the issues that were of importance to someone to be aired.  When the five minutes is up, if there is still heat in the discussion, park it and return to it later in the retrospective.  Such an approach is more incremental, and dare I say it, Lean.

This appeared as a headline in my iGoogle world news tab today.

A series of disclosures about Gov. Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s choice as running mate, called into question on Monday how thoroughly Mr. McCain had examined her background before putting her on the Republican presidential ticket.

Now I care little about American politics and even less for the Republicans, but it strikes me that vetting politicians for anything and everything they have ever done (or indeed anyone close to them has done) is a path to ensuring politicians of the future will have to be closeted and avoid living “real” lives.

To be young in e-enabled socieites means to be connected. Myspace, Facebook, Bebo… If you do not have a page yourself, chances are one of your friends will. And if they have a Facebook page they’ll probably upload photographs to it. And if you happen to be in a photograph…

Pictured: The mayor who got drunk and climbed up a pole to celebrate friend’s birthday

In the photo published on the social networking website he stands on two metal bollards for support while clutching the lamp-post as his two friends pose underneath him (Deputy leader of the council and a Tory county councillor.)

In a connected world the “vetting” process becomes scary. The message it sends out is that if you want to be a politician of the future, stay away from social networking sites, stay away from anyone who inhabits them… in other words stay away from “normal people” (who as a politician you will one day stand up and claim to represent).

We crave politicians who are human yet in a world where any indiscretion becomes instant public knowledge, and becomes acceptable to everyone but politicians, what of our people of power in the future?

Can you imagine the following dialoge on a social networking site and the impact it would have on the politicians career:

B: Sir, you are drunk.
C: And you, madam, are ugly. But in the morning, I shall be sober.

How times change.

Recently I was told of a Blue Chip comapny whose IT organisation, in the guise of cost cutting, has recently disbanded its QA function.  From now on, testing will be conducted by the developers themselves.  Since when have developers relished the role of testing?  It is inevitable that this cost cutting solution will end up costing the organisation more than it saves.

At the end of last summer I was working with a bank on their on-line retail banking strategy.  During a workshop with representatives from their mortgage business they made it clear that they saw the biggest sector for growth in 2008 was the buy-to-let market.  I left the workshop shaking my head, were they not reading the same newspapers I was?  Even then I didn’t need a crystal ball to tell them that they were putting their eggs into the wrong basket.

Clearing out old paperwork, I came across a document describing the technology strategy for a blue chip organisation that I’d worked with in the past.

There is a guiding principle that is being applied to product technology selection that says we do not follow a ‘best-of-breed’ approach, but rather select a major technology leader (IBM) and ride their product development cycle. This means we explicitly seek and accept the “80% solution” rather than trying to optimise for each and every possible requirement. [We are] emphatic on this point. What this means in practice is that, following the selection of IBM WebSphere Application Server… add-on functionality should be sought from the IBM WebSphere family of products first. Shortcomings will be made explicit in order that we can escalate with IBM, and influence their product strategy.

No rationale was given for their preference for going with a single vendor rather than a best of breed solution, but talk to developers who have used best of breed products and the above mentioned vendor product and they will almost certainly come down on the side of the “best of breed” (that is why they are best).

During the dot-com boom I worked with bank who were developing a WAP mobile banking platform.  Trouble was it could only be accessed via a Nokia 7110 (the first mobile phone with a WAP browser), the experience sucked - “Worthless Application Protocol” and the market penetration was never going to reach beyond the most hard-core (and GUI-patient) of early adopters.

At the time the same bank was intent on closing as many branches as possible - branch banking was considered unprofitable; on-line was the way forward…  yet several years later I was back in the same bank helping them with their in-branch customer experience.

We all must have examples of times when we have shaken our heads and asked of others do they really know what do are doing?   Whose interests are their decisions in aid of?  You may not be able to do anything proactive about it at the time, but the question is, what can you learn from these encounters and how can you use them to teach others in the future.

In the current market conditions the easy and obvious thing to do when turning to cost cutting is to wield the knife heavily on IT. New projects get culled, recruitment freezes and contractors get laid off as IT spend shrinks. This is a knee-jerk reaction and rarely in the long term interests of the oganisation. Surely the current market downturn should be seen as an opportunity to invest in IT, use the slack period to improve processes when they are not stressed, and get ready for the upswing when the economy turns.

We recently completed writing a response to an RFP. It weighed in at just under 100 pages with almost 34,000 words. OK, so there was a lot of copying and pasting going on, but that is not an insignificant amount of effort. Multiply that by the number of suppliers who were invited to respond; add the time taken for the client to produce the RFP itself, then review responses and answer questions and it is clear that RFPs consumes a lot of everybody’s time. With the winner taking all, that is a lot of wasted effort. But hold! That is only the first stage! The list of suppliers is whittled down and a beauty parade follows. Yet more effort is spent by two or three vendors turning their word document into a bunch of PowerPoint slides. A favoured supplier is identified and a process of negotiation follows, based upon estimates and what little information the supplier knows. Finally the supplier is selected, inevitably their are surprises on both sides when the engagement starts.

So the RFP process is a standard (but inefficient) way of doing business. What if it was done a different way?

One of the more significant decisions you make in your life (if you have children) is where you will send them to school. It is not a decision you make lightly as it will have a major influence on how your child grows up in the world. In the UK the government provides data (league tables) but this can only tell you so much; there is more to education that the statistics tell (which are historical and do not necessarily reflect the current reality your child is going to face). You will probably ask around - seek the wisdom of the crowd. Undoubtedly the community can identify good schools and bad schools. But the best judge of a school is to go there, to look around, to meet the teachers, to see the children. Do you trust the leadership of the head? Would you be happy for this person to teach your child, would you like your child to play in this playground, (and more importantly) grow up with these children?

So why not apply this thinking when looking for a supplier to build you an application? At the end of the day, projects succeed on personalities and relationships. Will the vendor get on with the buyer? The RFP tells you little about that. What if the RFP process was like seeking a school for your child? What if you had a project open day where you welcomed suppliers in, got to meet them, and maybe even got them to compete against each other.

What if you had three intense days when the business, IT and prospective invited suppliers come together to define the project and complete against each other in teams to come up with the “best” solution.

What if you provide the suppliers with details of what you are looking to achieve and request a basic qualifier - company details, profitability etc (the stuff that goes on every RFP) and a list of clients they have built similar products for (not exceeding one page of A4 per client). And for costings you ask them to provide you with their proposed rate card.

What if you then invite all suppliers to a large venue with a space for everyone to gather, and break out areas for the individual suppliers to work in. You start with background and presentations from the business and from IT. You tell the story of what you want, the vision, a description of the current technology, constraints, assumptions, known risks, integration points, etc. You provide some initial direction as a large group, but then breakout into supplier teams, interspersing each team with your people - from IT and the business. You provide technology (access to your systems, whatever is needed) and domain expertise. What happens next is up to the suppliers. They then have two days to impress.

What if at the end of each day each supplier presents their output to the whole group. The following morning you outline what you like of the outputs and ask the teams to take that as input to work on. Then at the end of the last day each vendor puts in an anonymous sealed envelope with their estimate (resources required to build the application). Can this triangulation technique be any less accurate than the estimate given on the back of several pages specification in an RPP?

If we accept that IT projects are about people, implemented by people, then the benefit of this approach is that you get to work with the supplier and experience the relationship first hand, rather than through documents and practiced PowerPoint presentations. And for the supplier it reduces the time taken to respond and will be more enjoyable for those involved. After all, don’t people prefer to do rather than write about what they do?

In their paper Content preparation for cross-cultural e-commerce: a review and a model, Liao et al. conclude that (1) Westerners pay more attention to information about product components or contents than East Asians and (2) East Asians pay more attention to information about price… than westerners. This is in the context of eCommerce in “present[ing] appropriate information content to facilitate consumers’ decision making”.

A practical example of this in the bricks and morter world can be seen at this Sandwich bar in Hong Kong.

Clearly modelled on the western way of buying sandwiches, the counter layout supports the customer selecting the product (sandwiches and fillings on display) moving on to the cashier at the end of the counter to pay.

This isn’t the way things are done in Hong Kong where money comes first before the product. “Please place your order at the cashier”… before dwelling in front of the display cabinet. This results is congestion around the cashier counter and poor workflow and a slow and tedious customer experience.

Sandwich bar or internet offering, consider cultural differences before transferring the concept and content.

Me: “Hello, I’d like to book a flight back to London on Thursday please”.

BA: “Certainly.  BA 28. Midnight Thirty Five.”

And that was it.  No friendly warning, so close to doing this again.

If I ask for a flight on Thursday, common sense suggests that the fact that the plane is scheduled to depart 35 minutes into Thursday, and I need to be at the airport at 10pm on Wednesday, then it really isn’t a Thursday flight.  Not being explicit and clear with this is rude business.

Documents, or rather words are the scourge of product design.  Because words can never convey the true meaning or emotion of what is really required.  All to often, software development projects are driven by the documentation - agile projects can be equally guilty of this- driven by words on paper (or card) that convey what the requirement is.  Issue #1. Developers don’t read!

Except for a few exceptions, software is all about a user interacting with a system in order to accomplish a goal.  Trying to describe that premise in terms of features and functionality is fundamentally flawed as it will be nested in the language of technical implementation, not in the user interaction.  “Find” becomes “search”, “buy” becomes “shopping cart”, “check” becomes “validation” and so on.  Issue #2. The desired outcomes become lost in a smog of technical jargon.   

Solution: Picture Driven Design.  Up front.  Yeah!  I’m all for up front design!  A picture tells a thousand words.  It has the power to remove ambiguities, clarify the vision, showing what the journey to realise outcomes look like.  Start with a day in the life of…  scribble out the flow, the user journey.  Nothing complicated, boxes and arrows.  Then scribble out what the user interface might look like.  Done.  That’s your up front design.  That’s your documentation.  That’s your scope.  What you do next is up to you, write loads of documents that describe it and produce the software in a waterfall way if you want.  I’d prefer you were more lean and adopted agile practices, but whatever you do, start with the picture.  I’m convinced it will save much pain later on.

When a customer starts completing an application or registration form it demonstrates they are committed.  It therefore makes sense to pay attention to the usability of that form.  But how often is the content of the form considered?  Are there content barriers in the form that prevent customers from completing it?

Marcelo Calbucci (Via Luke Wroblewski) describes a barrier that everyone assumes just has to be there so it is not tested: The CAPTCHA.    When the team removed the CAPTCHA from the Sampa.com registration form they recorded a 10% increase in conversion rates.  Marcelo writes “we created a set of tests and rules that will make us not display a CAPTCHA about 99% of the time” (interestingly when I looked at the page I got the CAPTCHA).  A 10% increase in conversion is not insignificant, and probably more than outweighs the additional effort to implement an alternative solution.