Category Archives: Where is the value?

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The building I had planned to work in today had problems with its air conditioning so I elected to work in my home office. About an hour into my day, my air conditioner suddenly shut down along with all the power in the house.

I glanced outside to see the hydro lines bouncing and a construction crew scurrying about. Once the excitement was over they went back about their work. Using my keen problem management skills I ascertained that the root cause of my power outage was a line shorted by something hitting the power lines, and picked up the phone to report it.

That's when it dawned on me that the portable phones that we have require electricity to work. Fortunately I had cell phone coverage.

But wait, it gets better!

I called the utility company's automated attendant pressed one for this, two for that, and eventually my outage was recorded. I then received a message that if I had further information that would help them troubleshoot this incident, to stay on the line and speak with an attendant.

In mere moments an attendant responded and asked me the nature of my call, recorded all the same information that I had just entered, and then seemed uninterested in the vital information that I was able to provide on why the outage occurred so that they would be able to resolve the incident more quickly.

Only somewhat satisfied that I had done all I could do, I returned to work on my battery powered laptop computer, only to be interrupted by the house phone ringing somewhere off in the distance. Dashing from floor to floor, I discovered our only non-portable phone in the house that I had forgotten that we still had. On the other end of the line was a helpful person from the field service group informing me that there was a power outage on my street (big news). He said they had no idea why, and would be dispatching a crew. He speculated that that some animal must have crawled inside the distribution box.

I've had it! I'm packing up and finding a third location to work from today. I sure hope they have coffee, air conditioning and efficient process for service delivery...

Is a 1hour user session really necessary in order to use a cel phone?

learning session

I saw this sign on a recent trip to the Eaton shopping centre in Toronto.

Behind me, the Apple store was overflowing with Iphone enthusiasts who didn’t feel the need for any sort of training. 
 

September 21s, Ontario Hydro requested a rate increase to cover the cost of operating and maintain smart meters. As a consumer, I am outraged!

When technology is implemented as a means of making services more cost effective, and that same technology results in a rate increase, that is not progress!

If you are not familiar with smart meters, Hydro introduced them recently as a way to influence consumer demand and shift more of the load to off-peak hours. Presumably this allows the hydro company to service that demand using existing capacity, rather than build more generating stations.

For this to work, consumers must buy in to the benefits of “off-peak pricing.” The carrot is that you can reduce your own Hydro bill.

hydro meter

In my household that meant buying a programmable dishwasher that could be set to start at 2am when rates are low. The Return on investment calculation around buying a new dishwasher was based on newer models being more efficient, but also being able to easily take advantage of off peak pricing since the dishwasher could be automatically scheduled to take advantage of cheaper rates.

Now, Hydro has to raise the rates in order to maintain the smart meters, and as a result, charge me more. That’s not progress, that’s just technology for technology sake!

Of course, Hydro will also argue that there is another benefit of smart meters to consumers. Hydro can turn down your air conditioning during the day when no one is home, thus saving the consumer even more money.

Isn’t that nice. My own inexpensive programmable thermostat that turns down my air conditioner when I want it to, becomes redundant; Hydro will do it for me…IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY WHEN I AM WORKING AT MY HOME OFFICE! It makes me chuckle.

Like a drummer who gets irritated when a natural rhythm in the environment is off beat, or a musician that is sensitive to tones that are out of key, I become hypersensitive to service changes that are not well thought out.

Ah the joys of being a consultant who advises companies of how to plan and deliver services in an efficient and effective way that maximizes value and reduces cost. I become buried in the millions of improvement opportunities that I see around me every day, and this is just one more glaring example.

When a task needs completed or a service delivered, a sure fire way of determining that the person funding the initiative does not understand the value is when they focus entirely on price. It’s common to see decision makers shoot themselves in the foot with what looks like a legitimate stance to take. "Service costs are soaring so lets reduce the funding so that the service provider will be forced to do more with less." I blame the service providers for not being able to articulate value, not the decision makers. In many of these cases the service providers have been unable to articulate the value sufficiently to motivate the decision maker to find the funds. Many people remember the television commercial recommending regular oil changes as a way to reduce long term costs. Regardless of your opinion of the product, this commercial is a terrific benchmark to learn from for people who are too close to the product or service. Notice how they didn’t focus on the technology inside the oil filter at all? Instead, they focusing on higher value.

An online vendor I deal with has done a tremendous job of marketing their services to the community they serve. In fact, they created the on-line community!

Forward thinking organizations likes theirs are trendsetters and market leaders. They did everything right to ensure that when it came time for me to pull out my credit card, I thought of them first, but that is where the problems began.

It wasn’t enough to provide them with the typical credentials most on line retailers require to process credit cards. They also wanted additional information off of my card that nobody ever asks for. Fine. I provide information off the front of the card, off the back of the card, but now I have to go looking for the fine print. No matter, transaction complete…or so I thought.

The next step is order confirmation that involves responding to an email message. I get that.  What happens next is ridiculous.  I won’t bore you with the details but a problem with their system spawns 3 more email requests from them and eventually a fax.

By this time I am beginning to think they aren’t whom they say they are and are trying to rip ME off. NOBODY goes to this length to confirm a sale. It took less work to buy my last new car! 

If you are adopting technology to improve your service delivery, or even to cut costs and make it more efficient, do so in a way that places as little burden on your customers as possible. You do that by beginning with the process that you are trying to automate. Don’t make things up as you go and whatever you do, if you have an underlying problem with your system or processes, make it your responsibility to work through that, not your customer’s.

In my case I found the manufacturer, and then looked to see this supplier carried their product or one similar because they had gained my loyalty.  The next time I may not bother going to the trouble of trying to give them my business, and instead deal directly with the manufacturer, which is where all of this began.

This week I’m working with a group in northern Ontario. Snow is a way of life up here, so why does my rental car not have snow tires, or decent all seasons at a minimum? Why did I not only get stuck in the hotel parking lot, but also on the plowed main street?

The value of my rental car is that it enables me to get to the site to help my client. If it can’t do that, the car is worthless – the service has zero value to me. All of the components of that car have to be focused on that value. You could argue that better tires do not offer the company an adequate ROI because extreme conditions are unusual, but this is December in Northern Ontario Canada that we are talking about! 

You might blame it on head office located in some sunny warm region, but in this case the office that makes the decisions is located in Thunder Bay Ontario. Thunder bay is no stranger to snow even though they are farther south than where I am.

Delivering value means understanding the value to the customer, and that value can be destroyed by the weakest link in the system. The rental car company has lost my business. Their competitor has earned it and I’m making tracks…

In an effort to reign in the spending on projects, many organizations have implemented formal project management practices. This makes sense from the perspective of ensuring that the right things are being done at the right time, in a controlled and fiscally responsible way. What doesn’t make sense is the extreme that some of these organizations go to in order to control project costs.

Project management should be a resource to the project. It should help the project stay on track and improve communication with stakeholders.

Certainly there is a place for project management in tracking costs, completeness, and making sure that the people working on the project know what tasks are next on the priority list, however, if technology teams are criticized for being too close to the technology and not business savvy enough, project managers can be criticized for being too close to the project management tools and methodologies that they use.

The value is not in the reporting. The value is in enabling decisions and navigating the roadblocks along the way so that the project team can reach the customers goals efficiently and effectively.

In my opinion, too much time is spent measuring the "burn rate" rather than removing the costly obstacles.

© Wayne McKinnon 2009. All rights reserved.

© Wayne McKinnon 2009. All rights reserved.