Bad Service and Frustration - it can be avoided.

Oh, I know frustration and it is your fault!

Nothing seems to kick off a spiral of rage faster than poor service.  I reason this happens for me so quickly because I spend a majority of my time acting as a therapist, software developer, consultant and bucket boy for people who have very little appreciation for what it takes to build a web site.

In the midst of getting my insurance company to process my prescriptions, work a 45 hour work week and do more development for E₃ systems, I try to go out to lunch each day as a respite from work.  What I was confronted with was poor service. 

As someone struggling to lose weight, I have taken to salad bars.  On a rainy Monday, I was confronted by a messy and poorly stocked salad bar.  Dressings were mixed together resembling a Jackson Pollock canvas, several toppings were missing, and no one seemed to notice or care that I was just standing there shocked that I was paying $10 for a poorly stocked buffet.  A waitress came up to me and apologized and said she would get the manager to restock the salad bar. 

The manager never came, the salad bar was not restocked and I was doomed to listen to the waitress offer more futile apologies for bad service.  My blood pressure and cholesterol levels matched my frustration.  I left a meager tip and left before the negligent manager had a chance to wish me a nice day.  He will not get the chance because I will not be going back. 

This would not be so bad if it was not so common.  Countless times at restaurants, movie theaters, casins and night clubs I am confronted with poor service.  The reason is that managers there are worried about overtime and overhead instead of providing good customer service.  This focus trickles down to the staff who seem to make enough effort to avoid getting fired.  In the mean time, customers like me suffer in silence.

I keep thinking back to W. E. Deming and his 14 points of profound knowledge.  Managers should be more focused on providing quality experiences than the costs of those experiences.  It is a shame how many businesses ignore Deming and his lessons.  If customers are more happy they will leave bigger tips, come back more often and become the regular customers a business craves.  Focusing on costs and overhead leads to lower quality and less revenue in the long run.

Someday, I hope to practice what I preach.

Until next time.

Hard Lessons

Learning a lesson from the Gipper.

I do not know how to describe the last month other than a difficult slog.  In that time, I have learned some valuable lessons about myself and what type of leader I need to become.

My daytime career has seen the transition from consultant to full time employee.  This is the first time in over five years; I have not been on the consulting merry-go-round.  It is nice to have developed a modicum of trust and to know that I am not going to be cast off like a dirty piece of facial tissue.  I am also looking forward to medical insurance.  Still, it makes me wonder why it took over four years to find a place to call home. 

I have also spent the last four weeks compensating for the malpractice of some consultants I worked with.  I took it for granted that they were the same kind of professionals I was and that they were committed to getting the project done on time and on budget.  I was grossly deceived.
 
After some investigation, my team lead and I discovered that unit tests were rigged to pass rather than testing actual functionality.  Stubs were put into place instead of connections to a database and worst of all, instructions and code reviews were ignored. 

We were left with software one third complete and two weeks prior to release date.  I felt a mixture of feelings but the most dominant one was betrayal.  I trusted these individuals to help get the work done and they did the bare minimum to create the illusion of completion. 
All this has reminded me about a nugget of wisdom from Ronald Regan, "Trust, but verify."  I trusted the work of the consultants too much and my reward was four weeks of crunch time where we condensed nine weeks' worth of work into numerous 12 hour days. 

I will need to be less trusting as a manager and verify the work of my colleagues with a much more critical eye.  If I am going to be a leader I will have to internalize that lesson.  Otherwise, I am going to have a lot more hectic weeks and unhappy customers.
Until next time.

Never Good Enough

Being creative is fun but mighty frustrating
in the world of web development

The other night I was meeting with a potential client.  We discussed his needs and how our Sully® application could help him.  It was a very positive experience.  The interesting thing was listening to the customer talk about the software. 

“That is cool,” he said, “but it would be even cooler if it did this!” 

That line has spawned millions of dollars in consulting fees and countless hours of frustration for developers.  It is the source of all feature creep in any project plan.  I felt a ball of bile welling up in my throat after hearing the client utter that phrase.  I took a deep breath and the madness subsided but it made me wonder if anything a software developer does is ever good enough.

I do not think it is a secret that developers are a quirky lot.  We are highly intelligent, have an in demand skill and often behave like professional baseball players jumping from team to team for better money and perks.  I also speak from experience that we often see ourselves like artists.  This explains why as a group we can get defensive about what we do.  Spending hours of effort to get something to work just right is emotionally exhausting.  When that effort is greeted with a shrug and the contempt of someone else it can drive a person crazy.

The feedback we often get from a business user is often inane and unhelpful.  You only have to watch a scene from the movie Amadeus to see a classic example of this criticism at work when the King of Austria tells Motzart his opera “…has too many notes in it.”

It has taken me over twenty years to learn how to deal with all kinds of customer feedback.  These lessons have been painful experiences found during bouts of unemployment and stress.  It amazes me that I did not discover them sooner. 

Business user approach software the same way many of us listen to popular music.  We don’t understand the technical details of how to play music but we know what we like.  So it doesn’t matter to most people that a song is being played in the 2/4 time or that it is in the key of G.  We just know that Credence Clearwater Revival's “Bad Moon of the Rise” is catchy.  So when we dislike a song we ofter have an emotional reaction to it rather than a rational one.  We can criticize it saying it lacks harmony and the minor key is off putting; instead we just say we don’t like it.  Often we sound like dancers on the old American Bandstand television program claiming “That song has a good beat and you can dance to it.”

Replace popular music with software and it is the same experience.  People interact with software much like they do with music.  I suppose that is why there are so many Linux and Apple fan boys.  This is why I do not get aggravated as I used to when someone suggests improvements to my software.  They know what they like and they are just having trouble describing it to me. 

I start asking questions of the customer and try to find out what they are looking for.  Eventually you will get a meaningful answer to your questions and know what to change.  I also know how serious about these improvements they are when I ask if they are willing to pay extra money for that service.  If the answer is "yes" then I know they are pretty serious. 

I have just come to accept that most software work is not good enough and that the users will always ask for something faster, better and cooler.  That is a good thing because this quest means that we are making better products which will create a virtuous cycle of innovation. 

I just wonder why it took me twenty years to figure this bit of wisdom out.

Until next time.

Waiting for clients

Hopefully I won't end up like didi and gogo.

The life of an entrepreneur is not for the meek.  My emotions pinwheel from manic to depressive daily and I push myself to exhaustion regularly and I spend more time working with software code than people.  I feel like the characters from the Samuel Becket theater production of "Waiting for Godot." Instead of Godot, I am looking for clients.

Landing you first set of clients is always hard but after six months of business, I expected to have landed a few by now.  Fortunately my daytime job is keeping the lights on and my sales person is starting to make some progress.  Who knows, I might have a few contracts by the end of the quarter. 

Just because we are slow to gather clients does not mean we are slowing down.  There is another release of Sully® coming in two weeks.  Members of our board of directors are pitching in finding sales and producing YouTube videos to promote our product. 

I am very fortunate that I get a chance to chase this dream.  The lack of sleep and mood swings are just a down payment on success later on down the road.  I look forward to when the note comes due because I beats waiting for Godot!

Until next time.

Why you need Sully

Meet Sully, the software to help manage you inventory

I spend a great deal of time writing code and blogging about business.  At this stage of my career, I spend my days writing software for someone else and my evening working on my company.  It is a grind but I hope that my efforts now will translate into success later.  One can only hope.

Our main product at E₃ systems is called Sully®. With it you can keep track of your inventory and generate all the necessary documents to help run your business.   If you ship a lot of product we make it possible to create bills of Lading, packing slips, and invoices for your customers.  In addition, we make it possible to review that information anywhere you have a connection to the internet.  This is a big deal because most inventory systems only work when you are connected to your local network.

We make it possible for your sales force to know exactly what is in stock when they go to meet clients.  They can view that information on a smart phone or a tablet computer.  This is the beauty of a cloud based application.  You save time because you can view inventory and product information anywhere at any time.  If a customer has an inquiry you pull up the information on your smart phone.  Now you can concentrate on customer service instead of sorting through paperwork.

There is also a money saving component.  With the Sully® web application, you can track the turnover of product.  Inventory is now a breeze as we generate easily printable reports to help your pickers perform counts quickly.  You never have to scan a document again because any paper document communicates with your smart phone using Microsoft Tag Technology.  Finally, since this system is cloud based you subscribe to it like electricity or cable television.  Instead of having to purchase a server, software and a staff to maintain it, you can now allow us to manage your system for you.  This makes a huge difference and helps you concentrate on running your business instead of worrying about your inventory management software.

E₃ systems offers you a product which will save you both time and money. It can be used anywhere you have a web connections.  It can be used by most types of devices weather a PC, laptop, tablet computer, or smart phone.  Finally, you can have this entire time and money savings for the cost of cable television.

If you think this is a good deal then give drop us a line via e-mail at mail@goeeethree.biz  Myself or one of my sales people will be more than happy to help.

Until next time.

Dot Anything Goes

Things are going to get mighty interesting and not in a good way.

Anytime there is more choice for any good or service, it is considered a good development.  However, neuroscience is starting to prove that too many choices can lead to intellectual paralysis and bad decision making.  The adage about having too much of a good thing keeps getting confirmed. 

This may be why the January 2nd story from Crain's Chicago business intrigued me so much.  ICANN on January 12th is opening up domain registrations for any type of generic top-level domain.  This means that a company can have a web address like this:  www.home.mycompany name instead of the more conventional www.mycompanyname.com.  As they describe it in the article, this will herald the beginning of the "vanity plate" era of web addresses. 

News of this latest innovation was greeted with universal opposition from federal officials, non-for-profits, and plenty of major corporations.  Only one thing could unite so many desperate groups; in the world of .COM, .NET and .ORG additional base domain names become a money losing proposition and an opportunity for thieves and squatters.

Plenty of businesses have to purchase additional domains so they can protect their brand.  The most infamous case was WhiteHouse.com which directed users to a porn site before the domain was purchased by the federal government.  Current GOP candidate Newt Gingrich also has a similar problem as squatters have purchased Newt Gingrich.com and refused to sell it back to the former house speaker.  If this is the kind of mischief which can take place with 22 domain names imagine the chaos of an infinite number of names.

I love choice.  This is not choice it is craziness and that is going to cost large and small businesses lots of money.  Currently, colleges and universities are snapping up .XXX domain names to prevent companies from creating porn sites featuring their co-eds.  This is money which could have been used on students; instead they are fighting pornographers looking to make a buck. 

I hope that people will be responsible with these new types of top level domains but considering the lawless and libertarian nature of the web, I have a very bad feeling about what might happen next. 

Until next time.

Bad Mythology

Don't work your employees to death

Sometimes you stumble on a blog that is so good you can’t help but share it.  This one comes from the Harvard Business Review. 

Tony Schwartz talks about the four myths companies still live by.  Most relevant to me is #4.  I have worked for organizations which have expected developers to work nine or ten hours a day six days a week and they wonder why those developers quit or burn out. 

The key to getting more work done is to use time wisely and to put into place systems which make the most of the people you have.  Anything else is an excuse for employee burn out.  I hope that as business picks up I am not forced to transform my employees into wage slaves.  To do anything else would be to obey an outdated mythology.

Until next time.