dancingmango

Guess who? (Kill the Agile Buddha)

Guess who am I now.

I’m in a supermarket, I’m pushing a trolley. I’m putting items into it. I just need some bread and I’ll be going to the checkout. Who am I?
I’m in a bank, queueing up in front a machine for depositing cheques. I’ve got a couple of cheques I need to pay in. Who am I?
I’m in an electronics store. I want a new printer but I’m not sure what’s the best for me, I’m looking for someone to help me. Who am I?

Or maybe what am I?

I am a customer.

Aren’t I?

Business language backs up my assumption. The employee at the supermarket checkout is called a Customer Service Rep, my personal (customer) details are held in the banks Customer Relationship Management system, in the electronics store I’m looking for Customer Support. And after I’ve bought my printer I’ll be asked to complete a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

So everything indicates that I am a customer. Or that is what I thought I was.

Apparently not according to the Scrum zealots.

At Agile 2009 Tom Illmensee presented a paper “5 Users Every Friday: A Case Study in Applied Research”. It describes how an eCommerce division of an electronics retailers introduced agile and how the user experience team adapted to agile. It starts by describing how their initial forays into agile were deemed successful. It was collaborative with the disciplines well integrated; “whiteboard wireframes, minimal documentation, and product demos. Usability tests with paper and semi- functional prototypes were conducted with shoppers each sprint”. More than that, the whole team enjoyed the experience. A decision was made to “take agile to the next level”. The next level was the introduction of a consulting firm who brought in scrum training. The scrum dogma was painful to adopt, but they got there in the end. But there’s a line in the paper that made me angry:

“The peculiar semantics of Scrum were especially confusing at first. In retail customers were people who bought things like stereos and flat-screen TVs. Not anymore. Agile had changed the definition of perhaps the most important word in our business environment: customers were now internal product owners. Customers would now be referred to as shoppers—or users.”

I’ll write that again. Customers (the people who the business depended upon, and “the most important word in [their] business environment”) would now be called shoppers. Or users. Because in agile, customers are internal product owners.

Sorry, these consultants, these agile zealots, these software egos have got too big for their boots. Dan North, pulling to pieces the nonsense of ’software craftsmanship’ put’s it eloquently:

Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.

Software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver. Software is the means to an end, not the end itself. If a certified scrum master (certified master based on two days training and a multiple choice questionnaire, now there’s a farce) tries to rewrite your business language, tries to tell you that your domain language is wrong, show him or her the door.

There’s a budhist saying “If you see the Buddha on the road, kill him“.

If you see agile in your workplace, kill it.

Why kill the Buddha? because the Buddha becomes an object, your own illusion of what it is. And it this illusion is wrong.  To turn the Buddha into a religious fetish is to miss the essence of what he taught. Killing the Buddha means taking responsibility for yourself.  Same with Agile; to turn agile, to turn software development into a religious fetish is to miss the point of what it is all about.

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I presented on the customer theme a while ago, here are the slides.

And here’s me narating the slides on google video.

The bus and the beach

“And what if that person was run over by a bus” is the standard question for eliciting whether they are a ‘key man dependency’. If that person was taken out of the system, would the system be able to continue.

Talking about being run over by a bus isn’t the most pleasant language to use.  In a workshop today I heard a far more palatable question.

“What if that person’s six lucky numbers come up? What if they won the lottery. What if Monday morning for them was sipping Pina Colada on a palm fringed beach rather than supporting your obscure system…”

Smart meters. What will happen Vs. what could happen

Smart meters are the Next Big Thing at the Energy companies.

Over the next 11 years every household in Britain will receive Smart Meters, one for gas and one for electricity. This project will be one of the largest infrastructure projects to have taken place since the Second World War.

So says NPower.

I’m going to get a Smart Meter? Whoppeeedo!

Whilst the idea is compelling to the companies themselves, I don’t see them answering the question “so what” in a particularly compelling way.  They try, talking about “providing you with much more information on your energy consumption allowing you to be more fuel efficient and save money”, but really. So what?

(This calls to mind a quote from Jurassic Park where the Jeff Goldblum character says “Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”.)

Just because I can control my boiler from my iPhone when I am away from home…. well why should I? What is the point? What is the customer need that smart meters are fulfilling?

That is not to write off smart meters. But what else could they do? What new business models could they inspire?

How about introducing gamification to the way people monitor their energy consumption.  What if the customer could win recognition as being the most energy efficient in their street?  What if gamification could be used as a reward for more energy efficient behaviour?  What if it enabled people to trade their energy usage within their social network?

Lot’s of big ideas but I don’t hold my breath so see anything innovative coming to market anytime soon. Marketing departments may dream of such things but I don’t see them gaining traction when IT are tasked with rolling out functional requirements for mundane, pedestrian and unimaginative use cases.

Yet might there be a different way?

Dear Energy Provider. What if you carve out a niche within the larger smart meter project to build a test and learn capability? A capability that can rapidly develop ideas and take them to market as experiments, product betas. A place where technology is less of a concern than the idea. Many of the usual non-functional requirements can take a back seat as you take the concept to consumers. a place where the idea has to prove itself cheaply for real, or fail fast.

An interesting aside, the way that Mumsnet have developed a community site that attracts 25k per day:

Essentially, we started with a blank piece of paper, viewing ourselves as a platform provider, with the understanding the site had to be developed in collaboration with mumsnetters at every stage.

The most important factor has been letting the community direct progress and listening to what they want – almost all innovations, new site and product developments at Mumsnet are derived from members suggestions.

This happens on a day-to-day basis: we view the site as an ongoing beta or focus group. Most recently this has led to our ‘Off the Beaten Track’ section, covering sensitive issues which which users’ requested not to be indexed by Google. Their feedback and suggestions have also been instrumental to the design of our soon-to-launch mobile app.

What if, instead of rolling out Smart Meters to customers and extolling the virtues of how good the pedestrian things they do are, what if the energy providers derived new product innovations based on the smart meter technology through their customer suggestions.

And thinking more radically, what if they unlocked their data that the smart meters provide and let the community develop innovations (as with the UK government’s Open Data initiative).  There’s lots of new business models, new ways of working. But again, I don’t hold my breath for anything inspiring anytime soon.

Minimum viable mobile app

I was recently challenged by a product owner on how you can deliver a minimum viable mobile app.  Her concern was that she only gets one shot at launching her app on the app store, customer feedback is gold dust and the last thing she wants is to launch a half baked product that will result in a low customer rating.  Good stuff may come later, but if the first tranche of customers rate the product poorly, the product has already failed.

This is a valid concern, however when you review product feedback that consumers give, it is usually around the experience they have with the product shipped, i.e. issues with what it does, rather that what it does not.  Go to the app store and look for apps with really bad reviews. People complain that an app isn’t usable, is buggy, is hard to use (or is just plain ‘bad’). They don’t complain that it doesn’t have features.

Jason furnell recently blogged about the launch of the REA iPhone app. This was built with close collaboration between designers and developers, launching a Minimum Viable Product Minimum Delightful Product  that after a week was #1 in the Top Free Lifestyle Apps Category.

Getting the basic product right and introducing new features ‘enhancements’ later is preferable to releasing a fully featured product that fails to delight.

Rout me a parcel

Graham Charlton wrote a great blog on eConsultancy a couple of days ago on how on-line retailers are managing customer expectations. (Or not as the case may be). He takes it as far as the check out, but what happens next?

The ability for customers to track parcels and delivery is becoming increasingly common.

The requirement is simple. Take the package tracking status (that we have already) and display it to our customers.

The execution of this separates the customer led from the IT led. The former will take the internal codes and language, ditch the codes that mean nothing to the customer and translate the status into words the customer understands. The latter just display the internal codes and status verbatim.  Both deliver the same functional requirements, one delights, one confuses.

Compare the following:

1. BPost: what does “parcel is routed” mean?

2. Royal Mail: “We received item xxxxxxx at [Placename] DO on the 2010-12-22. The item is now ready for delivery.”

3 For exactly the same package at the same time, Amazon track its status as “Latest event: Out for delivery – Dec 22, 2010 4:34:51 AM”

As you’d expect, the eCommerce website does eCommerce the best.

Act like a startup

I recently presented at the AOP Forum on secrets of product success.  Twenty minutes to get through sixty two slides was fun; part of me tells me I need to slow down, be more considered and reduce the messages I want to get across.  Another part of me just says meh!

I ended the presentation with the below takeaway slide that is worth replaying here.  I believe that product owners need to start thinking more like entrepreneurs and their seedling product ideas more like start ups.

Think big: Start with a big picture, a vision, where you want to get to. This should be unconstrained thinking, divergent thinking before converging on the specifics.

Start small: Easier said than done, but this is the getting to a minimum viable product.

Fail fast: Get stuff to market quickly, test with your consumers and be ready to fail. If you fail early you fail cheaply. Realise that you have customers, users who are already passionate advocates of your brand. Take them on the journey of development with you. You not assume that everything you need to take to your customers must be polished and perfect. Don’t underestimate the positivity than can be accrued by engaging users in the development process

Grow success: Do not see the end of the project as the end of road. Getting to a first release is only the first step. Successful product owners will be engaged in a virtuous cycle of continuous design and continuous delivery. They can come up with an idea, a new feature and get it in to production in hours, or days rather than months.

Letting go is the hardest thing

Tim Brown from IDEO gave the audience at his TED Talk a simple exercise. He asked the audience to draw a picture of the person sat next to them. He gave them a minute to do so. He then asked them to show their pictures. “Sorry” was the stock reaction as the sketches were revealed. They had an inhibition on showing their work. When it comes to creativity, as we move beyond childhood we take on board inhibitions and feel more uncomfortable sharing our creative efforts unless we perceive them to be ready or any good. Getting a visual designer to share her work in progress is a challenge. We fear what others will think if our “deliverable” is not ready, is not finished or polished. We fear setting expectations, we fear disappointing, we kill our creativity with fear.

So we are uncomfortable at letting others into our personal creative process. Now take this to the organisation, to the enterprise and creative genocide is abound. Like the Head of Digital who had 130 different stakeholders to socialise the Organisation’s new website designs with. Enter the HiPPO. The Highest Paid Person’s Point Of view. And with a few of those on board you get design by committee and design mediocrity. Or the client who refuses to engage with customers or end users in the early stages of the design process in fear of what they might think. A fear of setting expectations, a fear that their competitors might see what they are up to. Killing their creativity with fear.

Letting go is the hardest thing. But it can also pay great rewards.

On 27th October people coming out of arrivals at Heathrow airport were greeted by singers and dancers and general merriment. As an ad campaign for T-Mobile by Saatchi & Saatchi it was inspired, creative but not without risk. All the members of the public filmed had to sign a release form, agreeing to their being used in the ad. What if they didn’t? But they did. Whilst meticulously planned, the success of the ad is in the general public. T-Mobile got over any fear they may have had of the unknown and let go of the product to let the crowd create. It’s an uplifting piece, and successful too; their youTube page has had over 5.5 million views. And to the bottom line? The ad saw a 12% rise in sales the week after airing.

The Apprentice

OK, so it’s a guilty secret, I watch the Apprentice.

Once upon a time a TV programme would have been broadcast, it would last the hour and then be over. Newspaper comment and water-cooler discussions would follow the next day. Today the show is bigger than just the broadcast hour; it has a digital life that goes beyond the TV medium. It’s more than just a website that is hosted by the BBC. Viewers participate in the the ‘back channel’ so as you are watching the show you are not alone in your emotions. Following the Twitter hash tag provides a running commentary of how the audience is reacting. Some shows extend their reach with the fictional characters themselves engaging in the dialogue. What Twitter starts with its immediacy, Facebook continues with the audience setting up groups. And so we have Stuart Baggs on the Apprentice, a clone of David Brent, treading on twitter and now spawning dozens of Facebook groups and pages (as I write 3228 people like “Stuart Baggs from The Apprentice is a **** not a Brand”). And let’s not forget the forums and blogs where comment and discussion on the programme thrives.

The apprentice experience is more than just the it’s packaging and content. What about your product?

Anyway. So last night the final five in the Apprentice were interviewed, with Viglen’s CEO Bordan Tkachuk being one of the interviewers. He cornered Stuart Baggs about claims he runs a telco. “Stuart you’re blagging to me. I know what an ISP is. It’s an Internet Service Protocol.” An Internet what? The CEO of a company that “has developed a peerless reputation for excellence in IT innovation, delivery and service” doesn’t know what ISP stands for?!

It got worse. Later in the boardroom Sugar was grilling him about Stuart’s credentials. Smugly Tkachuk declared that Baggs “says he has a telecoms licence on the Isle of Man… What he had was just a very simple broadcom licence.”  A what? Broadcom Licence?  WTF is that?

So here we have the CEO of an IT company who doesn’t speak the most basic IT language with any fluency. My takeaway from this is, no matter who they are in an organisation, never assume that the client you are working with knows everything.  And never assume that they know what you are talking about either. Make sure you speak a common language by asking for clarity and explanation; there’s no such thing as a stupid question.  Alternatively, “Tkachuk.  You’re fired!”

I’m presenting…

Tomorrow I’ll be at Agile, Lean & Kanban eXchange 2010, a Skills Matter conference talking about “Beyond delivery: delight“;How by applying Agile Experience Design throughout the product development lifecycle you can ensure that you rapidly deliver a superior product – targeted at the right customers and with a compelling customer experience.

Extraordinary but ordinary

“Two-thirds of HR and IT organizations develop strategic plans that are not linked to the organization’s strategy”. Says the father of the Balanced Scorecard, Robert Kaplan.

“This is extraordinary.” He adds. Too right, but that’s the wrong word, it isn’t extra- ordinary, it is ordinary.

It is ordinary for IT to develop an architectural strategy based upon their understanding of “the business” rather than the strategic ambitions of the organization.

It is ordinary to see “a chronic disconnect in organizations between strategy formulation and strategy execution.”

It is ordinary to see fundamental disconnects between IT and “the business”.

Like the bank who were porting their branch banking applications from one technical stack to another without asking the business to define which were strategically important and which were no longer fit for purpose.  Or the FTSE 100 company whose IT organisation built a new web platform and interactive services, in the knowledge that “the business” were developing a complete refresh of their on-line strategy but kept that at arms length (“because the business can never make decisions and we need to fix the technical issues we’ve got” with the current stack.)

Robert Kaplan proposes the “office of strategy management” to address these issues.  It may sound like organisational overhead, but it is hard to argue with a function whose purpose is to “unlock unrealized value by making strategy execution a distinct and recognized competency in an organization”.

And fundamental to this, and what large organizations so often fail to do is “enabling others—operating units and functions—to do their jobs in a way that supports the organization’s strategy”.