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By TaiTran, February 10, 2009 3:31 am

The three stories that trigger this post

I’ve been occupied with some thoughts resulting from some articles I read or discussions I joined for some time. Here are three of them:

Story 1: focus

AnhHung and I had a discussion in our three blog posts on whether companies would want to pick a direction and fully focus or experiment with their ideas.

Just a quick note: I explicitly express my support for neither, in my post I pointed out where experiment is sensible.

Story 2: the registration form

Here is the story of how changing a button brings $300 million revenues.

I didn’t get it. That was not a small change in “only a button”. That was a major change in flow + database + architecture + graphic design, and it resulted from an R&D result.

With a change at that level, the Product Manager, Business Analyst (if any), System Designer (if any), Project Manager, DBA, Developer should be involved. Why does the article only highlight the designer?

Story 3: prototyping

Today I read about how great products like Gmail and AdSense were born from experiments and thought about where innovation should be placed. Before Paul had done what he did, AdSense had been a laugh, and because he did his experiment, Google had a billions-worth business.

However, some Gmail’s siblings from Labs didn’t make it.

So should they continue their experiments or should they focus?

The points we missed

Comparing different ambiances where the stories took place helped me realize the points we did not take into accounts which could somehow relieve the thoughts in my mind.

1. Type of product

1a. The reason why I put the flow from story 2 on the table was that we once had an issue when a developer changed a flow to make it more convenient for users and changed a form design to make it more attractive without going through the Business Analyst. When I saw the changes I freaked out as the they violated some regulations of the industry and we had to quickly revert the system before releasing to clients. It is not to blame anyone, it is to clearly state that there are might be reasons why something so inconvenient stays in the system.

However, for products that come from new & creative ideas, innovation deserves its space and time. If changes and new features suggestions must go through a lengthy process, two things could arise: the product does not move fast enough and the idea initiators might get frustrated and gradually lose their passion.

1b. Another aspect is whether the product is commercial or customized. Commercial products are offered to a large number of clients, and customized products are usually ordered by specific clients for their use only. For commercial products, the product team to brainstorm improvements and clients’ input take the form of feed backs. For customized products, users’ response can be obtained by taking the product directly to the client.

2. Software methodology

If the team employs Rational Unified Process, changes must go through change management process. If the team goes Agile, changes can be implemented quicker with more clients involvements. Smaller teams might be even more flexible.

If RUP is used then it’s valid to question where the Business Analyst is in a change, but if the process is different, it’s perfectly okay for the web designer to initiate a usability improvement.

3. Corporate type: established or startup

A good example to take is Google itself. There are tales about how open it was and how data was easily accessible and how anti-corporate the team was when the company was still a startup. But now Google is a mature enterprise with corporate hierarchy and naturally enough management practices are in place.

How large the companies are is a big factor in their choosing strategies.

And it’s funny if we compare a public company with 20 thousands employees to a startup with ten people.

4. Era

The time when Gmail took of and the time 6 of her siblings were axed are not the same. 2004 was a good year to start a new service and 2009 is when companies need to cut costs.

5. Position

Lastly, the arguments people brings to a discussion of one topic vary depending on their perspective and position.

For example, the product builder might want to try out with different intiatives, the analyst might want to draw the patterns, the marketer might want to emphasize the position of the brand, the venture capitalist might want to see a business model out of an idea.

It’s fascinating how we have different people with different interests joining together and personally this reminds me that sometimes we can never reach a consensus from a debate.

Summary

This entry is meant to organize some fighting thoughts inside my mind and that’s all it should do.

I don’t intend to make a point here, but I hope you enjoyed the articles that I quoted. Here they are again for your convenience:

Jared M. Spool, The $300 Million Button

Paul Buchheit, Communicating with code

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By TaiTran, July 12, 2008 1:39 am

Have you been bitten by an ant? Did it hurt much or was it just itchy?

Have you imagined being thrown to an ant nest? People might get killed from a whole herd of these small creatures.

The same visualization happens to the quality of software products.

Cosmetic and Severity

In a software project, Severity of a defect is often weighed on different levels. Through the terminology might vary, four levels are usually used: Critical, Major, Minor, and Cosmetic.

• Critical is when the defect hangs the program or stops the business completely
• Major is when a the program yields an unexpected result or a business rule is violated severely
• Minor is when an unexpected result can be neglected or a word-around can be used
• Cosmetic refers to usability issues, misspelled words, graphical designs like indent or color palette

Critical ones always receive highest priority to be fixed immediately. Major and Minor ones depend on the complexity and cost of the defect.

What I want to discuss here is Cosmetic defects.

Cosmetic are trivial

Since Cosmetic defects don’t normally stop the business or make transactions go wrong, they usually receive lowest priority. Next, because everyone is busy, every team is busy, these defects might never be solved and just stay there in the bug-tracking system.

“Cosmetic ones are trivial to fix”, said many developers. Yes, one defect on font size or misspelled word may take no more than 5 minutes to be complete flushed. And yet, it is trivial to be fixed…

However, on some occasions, cosmetic defects are one of the hardest ones to debug. It happened once when my team was developing a state-of-the-art system on .NET 3.0 beta in 2005. Because the platform was still in beta, many controls such as grid were not fully supported. When data in the grid could not be managed, the R&D team managed to code the control themselves. It took the three men 2 months for this task. 66 man-days was not an easy number, but since the customer wanted it so badly, on the way they went… Half a year later, the control were fully supported by Microsoft!

Well, the story above is just one exception, let’s get back to our commonly accepted perspective: Cosmetic defects are so trivial they simply itch rather than hurt anyone.

However, from the other side of the line, things are 179 degree different…

The customer simply doesn’t see as a developer sees, or vice versa

The time of “give me a useful application” has long passed. Customers nowadays yeld for “useful and beautiful suites”. Sad but true, users take for granted the functionalities a system has to offer; they don’t care the perfect architecture the development team may be very proud of. This is true it hurts.

Quick ‘n’ flick Google products, highly elegant Apple products and glossy Web 2.0 design are some of the things that plant the desire for beauties in software users today. Presenting users a messy, inconsistent system with easy-to-spot mistakes upsets them greatly, and expect recession in sales figure.

To make things worse, with more communication channels than ever information travel so fast within vertical communities that the brand of the software might be severely “injured”.

Conclusion

Is it time we reconsidered how critical Cosmetic defects have grown to be? I believe no time is better than now to sit down and put our hands on these trivial, 5-minute improvables.

Comments (8)

By TaiTran, October 13, 2007 4:36 pm

So great! We have the chance to meet, work with and learn from a lot of interesting and talented people.

The job of a Business/System Analyst is so fascinating and challenging. I am not, at all, surprised to see the growing interest in this position.

Comments (4)

By TaiTran, September 29, 2007 4:23 am

Abstract

This article gives a guide on how to make profits from an enterprise’s Customer Supports function. Two advanced business opportunities are discussed. It also describes the impact of technology, process and strategy in the business renovation.

Customer Support: From the traditionally cost sector…

Customer Support function has long been considered a cost to business, as it rarely brings more values.

Well, is it the case? If it is accused to not bring values, is it possible that they did not attempt to get value from it?

…To getting golds back from the star-fruits quezacotl

“Vietnamese folklore goes that once upon a time, a man was very annoyed by a strange large bird eating the star-fruits in his garden. He tried to trap the creature and when he succeeded, the bird offered to carry him to a gold island to be released. The man became prosperous with the gold he picked from the isle after then.”

You can get a high Return on your Investment into Customer Support.

Many entrepreneurs know that good customer support is what makes customer happy and thus more willing to buy more and/or spread the good words. Customer Support has been recognized as a PR tool rather than.

Customer Support can be exploited to:

• Increase customer satisfaction
• Develop customer loyalty
• Make the current customers spread the good word: the famous word-of-mouth marketing technique
• Build a community of customers
• Enhance the brand of the enterprise

Now, let’s push it further than that.

(1) Customer Support to increase employee satisfaction

Employee satisfaction is an intangible value of any enterprise. In real life, business development and employee growth is generally mutual exclusive. A way to solve the dilemma will be discussed.

(2) Customer Support as competing Strategy

Becoming the first in the industry requires good Strategies. Maintaining the position requires better Strategies. With the rapid flourishment of the knowledge economy, technology has come in place to revolutionize strategic planning. More on strategies coming next…

How? The five steps

1. Just read

Before actually doing it, it’s advisable that you explore what need done in order to achieve your goal. This article’s got it all for you from a very high level view.

2. Automate it

Employees who do the Customer Supports are agents with specific customer management and troubleshooting skills.

Agents’ tasks are repetitive and require a high level of concentration and accuracy. On the other side, managers want to be updated periodically and recurrently without having to micro-manage. This can put a lot of pressure both employees and team leaders.

Ultimately, now that we are setting the business objective very high (remember all the items covered above?), it would be next to chaos if all things are done manually.

The work must be automated. It is then agents are provided with tools to complete their works, checklists so as not to miss any item and instant support when they need it. Managers receive reports, statistics and figures to analyze and make decisions. Furthermore, automation saves man-hours so the firm may concentrate on developing the most talented workers. Eventually, automation frees all levels from tedious and repetitive works to spend more time on thinking how to improve the process.

A system should be in place to do the harder works so that people can work smarter.

3. Establish a process to support it

For any system or workflow to work properly, the process must be modified to support it.

Process has to be defined so as to gradually switching from paper works to entering and obtaining information from the systems installed.

Re-defining the process is the next investment an enterprise has to spend. However, the Return on Investment shall be well worth it. With automation in place, costs of some processes themselves will be cut down significantly.

For example, it used to take at least 15 minutes to search for a file of a customer in a heap of documents. Now it takes maximum 15 seconds to get all information of that customer by searching in database. That makes it 32 times faster!

So far, Statement (2) has been explained.

4. Mean to really support it

When the system and the process has been in place is the time for training and changing the habit of users. Training effectively has been difficult enough, making a change is even more.

It requires high commitment and strong confidence from Board of Management to request, encourage and motivate employees into the new environment.

Eventually, only if the change is seen as the key strategy to compete will all of its potentials be unlocked. Nothing is more powerful than union between all attending parties, strategies, processes and the product.

5. Let the whole world know

Just what are you waiting for? Let the whole world know
that you’re different,
that you have leaped ahead of all your competitors,
that your customers will be served the best way possible.

Life Business prospect has never been as bright.

Case Study

Suppose you’re the owner of an electronics retailing chain.

You may want to know the level of satisfaction of your customer. You will conduct a survey using Customer Relationship Management System (CRM). Since most of your market segments use the Internet regularly, it is easier to release the survey in electronic format.

To ensure that the survey is done correctly, you may want to arrange your agents to help/guide your (potential) customers through the survey. How do you know if your agents are doing well? Start the Quality Monitoring (QM) System. It will track the interaction between you agents and customers, be the media text chats, audio or video. After saving the interaction, you can always review and remark the performance of any specific agents.

Oh! Some agents are not doing as well as you expected. What will you do? It’s suggested that you review their skill set and portfolio in the Human Resource Management System (HRMS) to make judgment on how to grow them to the required level.

After obtaining the information on the agents, you may want to send them to Training. Today, training doesn’t have to be formal classes with costly instructors from outside. For your information, thousands – I mean hundreds of thousands – training courses, from business to technical, from soft skills to customer management, have been packaged in the form of e-Learning, delivered to your PC, and always ready to launch.

After the training, expect “Wow!” expressions from your beloved customers!

Now that your employees receive adequate feedback of their performance and personalized training addressing their gaps. Their productivity and loyalty will increase proportionally. Happier agents, happier customers too. By the way, has this solved the problem (1) listed above?

The whole process covered above should always be put under supervision. Thank goodness, software can do the micro-tracking for you. With information collected, it is time for Information Analytics power to shine. You can ‘teach’ the software to ‘know’ your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and it will compare the actual performance against your goals to produce conclusion, warnings and predictions.

At the very end of the process, Reports only need to be generated for You to know everything you want, with as few key hits as you want.

Notes

Please note that while I described this scenario for Customer Support only, similar approach can be used on a wide range of business functions: sales to production management, delivery to marketing. Software can be much more powerful if you know how to exploit them.

The case above involves several systems/modules. Theoretically, CRM and HRM systems are typical of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems; Quality Monitoring, Training, KPI are typical of Workforce Optimization Systems.

Conclusion

It can be concluded that from my analysis, Customer Support should no longer be considered a cost. Instead, it brings more opportunities if it is used the right way, is supported with functional systems and appropriate processes and is lead by a clear strategy.

Acknowledgment

with special thanks to:

Gideon Schipper, Business Analyst Manager, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Minh Nguyen, Business Analyst, First Consulting Group Vietnam

Phuc Nguyen, ASEAN System Manager, Procter & Gamble