A recent incident raised again the issue of supporting the people who speak directly to people. The systems that support them are exceptionally important, but all too often are difficult to handle. Here is the incident as it happened:

I walked into a facility locally to pay a bill. Went to the customer service desk where I had been directed and a charming person got my information efficiently and started to enter it into her computer. All well and good so far EXCEPT that a mistake was made … a minor one … she got one of the numbers on the payment mixed up. Now comes the fun part. Can she just undo the error and make the correction? No. Can she just undo and redo the transaction? Maybe. Was there a simple way for her to handle it? No she had to get help. Suddenly, a 2-3 minute transaction is taking MUCH longer.

Not typical you think? That’s where the problem REALLY comes in. I’ve been with this organization for years and this sort of problem has happened over and over again. Not just with me, but with other people when I’ve been standing nearby waiting to be serviced.

The problem comes down to a user interface that may be beautifully conceived and designed, but is confusing enough that people make mistakes and then need help to correct them. I’ve run into this over and over again in working with systems both online on the web and offline in customer support systems. It’s not just the interface to the system which is usually at fault, there are in fact fundamental blind spots where the system overlooks the people who will actually be using it and doesn’t provide for them to correct mistakes. Transactions that get committed too quickly, complex ways to deal with common problems, easy normal procedures backed up by obscure recovery procedures. The list could go on and on.

Too little attention is STILL being paid to making systems useful. Too much attention is being paid to coming up with new interfaces that wind up confusing people rather than helping them.

Categories: Customer Service
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Ever heard of SMART Goals? I’ve seen several variations on the title, but it’s used something like this:

S - Specific
M - Measureable
A - Achievable
R - Relevant
T - Time dimensioned

Most people think of them as important for things like life goals or large projects, but you need to think about them even for small projects.

There are times when it seems that people just don’t realize how important goals like this are. If you have a project that you’re working on, take some time to develop SMART goals and you’ll find that everything goes smoother.

Let’s consider how we might want to apply this to a real situation. Suppose we need to build a presentation that’s important to get funding for a CFS project we REALLY want to do. Let’s see how each piece applies:

• Specific - What EXACTLY do you want to achieve in the presentation? What is success? What is failure? Be CONCRETE. Be EXACT.
• Measurable - How will I know I’ve been successful? How can I tell that my presentation has been successful? Are there questions I can ask that will give me an indication of the level of support?
• Achievable - Is the funding I need to get possible? Does it go beyond what the company has normally done? Is it realistic that the company will DO what I want it to do?
• Relevant - Does this REALLY matter to ME? Am I passionate about this or is this something that I’m expected to do for someone else? If it’s not personally important to me, then I’m probably not going to be as convincing as I might be.
• Time Dimensioned - What’s the deadline? You’ve got two here: FIRST for the presentation, everything has to be ready to present at the right time; SECOND for the project, even if you sell the project successfully, will you be able to meet the time constraints of the project itself?

Don’t take this as a need to build some sort of formal goal structure. That’s not necessary, but some goals, even informal ones, are important to success. As the size of the project grows and the size of your team grows from just yourself to dozens or hundreds of people, it will be important to bring more people into this process. When you’re growing your team, one of the first things you should do with each new person is sit down and go over the goals. Explain them. Let your passion show through. If you’ve never seen it happen, you’ll be surprised at how much energy this gives to new hires and how willingly they’ll jump in and contribute to your project’s success.

Once you can clearly see your goal and you know that you’re passionate about it, you know that it’s really achievable, then get to work and make it happen!

Categories: General, Project Management
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I’ll be moving in the next week, so there will likely be some interruption in my posting schedule. I’ll try to get some posts ready to go, but no promises.

Categories: General
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If you find this interesting, try these

• Writing for Techies - my collected notes and thoughts on writing, speaking, and communicating in general
• Antennas, Modeling, and More - Antennas, Propagation, and Low Power operation are my interests in Amateur Radio. Here is where I talk about them
• In2SciFi - My personal thoughts on a wide range of topics originally driven as a
• Obesity and Me - My thoughts on losing weight

Categories: General
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Since I started this blog, I’ve been trapping spam and rejecting it before it gets posted. I’m amazed at how much there is targeting blogs like this one. There is no discrimination, no attempt to get it to any sort of right place. Further, there is no apparent concern that it doesn’t get posted, just that it gets submitted. It’s hard to believe someone pays for this stuff, but obviously they do.

I’ve got to ask myself WHY? Why would someone PAY to have someone do this?

The stuff they’re trying to post isn’t just ’spam’, it’s junk. There’s no relation to the topic, just get some links out there. The worst ones are the ones that are trying to social engineer by posting something that LOOKS OK superficially. They have embedded links to questionable locations that have nothing to do with the topic or the words in the post.

So why? It’s simple really. People are making money at it. In fact, people are making millions of dollars doing this.

Categories: General
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Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK)

PMI, the Project Management Institute was founded in 1969 by a group of 5 people and has expanded over the years to the point where it is now accepted by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standards developer. It is a membership organization and considers itself to be the professional project manager’s organization.

The PMBOK is an attempt to establish a set of standards for Project Management. PMBOK has been accepted by ANSI as a standard for Project Management and as such, you will often hear it referred to by people working in the field.

The PMBOK breaks the process into 5 Process Mgmt Groups:

• Initiating - the first process which gets everything started. It includes everything needed to get a project started. Project Goals, Scope, as well as the vision of the end point all fit in here.
• Planning - here we refine and determine how it’s going to get done. The major effort here is the Work Breakdown Structure or WBS.
• Controlling - controlling and executing fit together in the VPIC model. Under controlling, we want to put everything associated with ensuring that the project is being done right and that we’re taking corrective action when something goes wrong.
• Executing - here’s where we get the resources and get to work
• Closing - closing involves evaluating and learning from what we did. It SHOULD also include a party to say thank you to everyone who worked so hard to finish

These are roughly similar to our VPIC model.

The PMBOK goes on to define 9 knowledge areas that we need to know to be successful

• Integration
• Cost
• Communications
• Scope
• Quality
• Risk
• Time
• Human Resources
• Procurement

We’ll come back to this over time as we go deeper into project management and what you have to know about it.

An important point to make here is that if you hire a professional project manager, particularly one who is certified as a PMP (Project Management Professional, a PMI certification), they’ll probably apply the notions in the PMBOK to running the project. Do you need to understand the PMBOK to understand project management? No … but you need to be familiar with the concepts so you can understand what you’re being told.

Categories: Project Management
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Basic Project Management

Project Management exists on many levels and with many degrees of complexity. For example, at one end of the scale, I learned project management in the Navy, training to use PERT systems in shipyards on New Construction. I was on USS Enterprise during refueling and USS Virginia when it was built. Building something as complex as a Nuclear Cruiser is a massive undertaking requiring not just one project manager, but many of them.

At the other end of the scale, project management can be just a step above time management where instead of just a task or a set of unrelated tasks that need to be completed, you need to complete a set of related tasks all of which lead to some goal. Building a Customer Facing System is in between these limits.

Most of the CFS projects I’ve worked on have been on the order of 100-300 thousand dollars, but I’ve project managed several which were over $100 million which involved complex systems, thousands of agents, multiple sites, and so forth. No matter what the size though, there are some constants in Project Management.

Over the years, I’ve needed to teach basic project management to teams that simply never thought of it as important. I’ve taught it to developers, consultants, architects, magazine editors, executives, and others. For the last several years, I’ve used the book To Do Doing Done by Lynne Snead & Joyce Wycoff as my text. For a more detailed treatment that covers the full range of project management, I refer people to the Project Management Institute’s (PMI’s) PMBOK:

I’m going to expand on some of my other writings I’ve done on project management to highlight some things that EVERYONE should know. This isn’t about being a project manager, but it’s about understanding enough of the basics that

1. You understand when you need a project manager
2. You understand what the project manager is telling you
3. You understand why the project manager is asking for some things

VPIC

I’ve been in too many projects where there was a rush to jump in and get things done. This is a major mistake!

Let’s understand something right at the beginning, no plan in the history of the world has ever worked EXACTLY as planned! Things change; Needs change; Circumstances change; and we just down right make mistakes. it happens on every project. Some people tend to think the time spent planning is a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth

Planning is essential to successfully completing a project, not because we’re going to build a perfect plan, we’re not. It’s essential because of the time you spend thinking about it. Thinking through what you’re going to do, thinking about contingencies, thinking about resources, all of that gets you ready for real life.

Overall, a project will roughly break itself down into 4 major pieces according to Snead & Wycoff. These go under the acronym VPIC:

• Visualize - every project starts with an idea, something you want to do or build, so we start by getting a clear picture in our minds of the end point
• Plan - once we know where we’re going, we need to know what we have to do, who’s going to do it, and how much it will cost in time, effort, and money.
• Implement - any project involves some amount of communication and control. When there are several people involved, this becomes more obvious, but even if we’re working on something alone, there is still a need to manage communications and control the project.
• Close - one of the big things that often gets missed is closure. I’ve seen to many projects where the people thought it was done when things when the goal was reached. If you don’t do some clean up and take advantage of the chance to learn something, you’ll never get better.

Over the next several weeks, I want to expand on some of these themes and relate them to more formal project management methodologies. We’ll talk some about several methodologies I’m familiar with:

• PRINCE2 Methodology - (Projects In Controlled Environments). This is the standard in the UK and I was trained on it when I was working on projects in the UK. It’s a thorough, comprehensive system.
• PMI Methodology - (Project Management Institute). Another comprehensive methodology
• A variety of methodologies adapted to specific areas like Agile Development

We’ll spend some time discussing methodologies and what they can do for us in case you’d like to learn more.

Categories: Project Management
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WOW! I didn’t see this one coming, but it’s been too long in coming ” … there are too many technologists in technology”. I found this in the article ‘Memo to Vendors: Here’s How to Build a Winner‘ by Mike Elgan of Computerworld writing for PCWorld. It’s the case not only for software systems, it’s also a problem for Customer Facing Systems (CFS’s) in general.

Elgan lists the following important points:

• Consistency
• Simplicity
• Performance
• Stability

In his words, all of these boil down to the issue of Control. Who is in control of the application? He goes on to discuss the flaws in usability testing ad the sort of issues that concern the people running them, but his point, and mine as well here, is that it’s more about how the person FEELS than the goal they’re trying to achieve.

When your customer faces your CFS, what do they see in their minds eye and what do they feel? Do they seem to see a technologist staring back at them explaining things in arcane language and getting upset when they do something wrong? Or do they see a friendly, helpful interface that gives them control over their destiny?

My contention is that too many CFS systems are built by technologists without any understanding of the customer’s point of view. Not just what they’re goal is, but how they FEEL about your company as they’re dealing with you.

Categories: Human Activity Systems, System Development
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I was reading the editorial on CRMToday’s web site by John Stanhope about Customer Experience Marketing. I was particularly impressed with his definition:

“Customer Experience Marketing (CEM) is a subset of an organization’s overall customer experience management strategy and drive to become customer-centric. CEM is about managing every single part of the interaction and experience a customer has with the organization; from the visual experience of advertising, to the actual experience of interacting with a website, customer support line or physical layout of a branch office, even to the standard of the product or service delivered.”

(Joe Stanhope,Vice President, Platform Strategy, Alterian Editorial in CRMToday 4 Jan 2009 available at http://www.crm2day.com/editorial/50603.php)

I was impressed with how well what he’s saying matches with the needs of ANY Customer Facing System - ” … managing every part of the interaction and experience … “. That one phrase summarizes the whole point here. Customers see a company as a single entity. They wonder how you seem to know every part of their lives, but can’t carry on a consistent conversation. Agents who are poorly trained or CRM systems that don’t make the right information available when a customer calls, all of these are part of the failure of our CFS systems to perform the job we need done.

For me, the problem with CEM as described is that it’s put forward from the point of view of the Marketing Department and gives Marketing the responsibility for seeing that it’s done right. I don’t think so. Marketing is an important player, but good Customer Facing Systems come from involvement that ranges from the front-line to the board room. Everyone needs to step up and take responsibility. This isn’t something that Marketing teaches people to do, it’s something that must be ingrained in everyone in the organization.

Categories: Call/Contact Centers, Customer Service, Web Sites
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