thinking about digital customer experience
Jerry Madden was one of the first strangers I ever met through the Internet. At the time he was working for NASA at the Goddard Space Center in Alabama as Associate Director – Flight Projects, which meant that he was the senior project manager at the Center.
He was also something of a folk anthropologist. Sometime in the 1980s he began collecting bits of wisdom about project management in the space industry, which he eventually edited into “100 Rules For NASA Project Managers.” He handed it out to his direct reports and new hires at the Goddard Center, and it quickly became a popular piece of aerospace engineering folklore.
I found the list in 1995 on a server at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California. I was surfing the Net with one of the early Netscape browsers. I discovered that many servers across the country—government, university, corporate—were just sitting out on the Internet unguarded. This situation quickly changed, but for awhile a person could cruise into any number of interesting crannies of the World Wide Web unchallenged.
At the time I was a partner in a young interactive agency in San Francisco called Ikonic. We were growing exponentially at that time, doubling in size every year until eventually we had 125 people and offices in San Francisco and New York. My partner, Robert May, was “Mr. Outside,” and I was the COO “Mr. Inside,” and responsible for how everything ran. So I was learning the value of great project management—fast.
Jerry’s list, as you will see, is filled with great career advice all within a simple and very valid framework of rules. One of my favorite jewels is this definition of a project manager:
“Vicious, disliked and thoroughly despicable persons, gentlemen and ladies can be project managers. Lost souls, procrastinators and wishy-washys cannot.”
As soon as I found the list I distributed around the office at Ikonic, and we actually began each weekly project manager’s meeting by reading aloud one of the rules and discussing its wisdom.
I wrote an e-mail to Jerry Madden to thank him and tell him how I found his list. A day later I received an e-mail reply:
“What an amazing time we live in,” Jerry wrote. “I’m sitting on my bed in a hotel in Mississippi writing to someone in San Francisco who found something I wrote on a server in Pasadena that someone passed along from a computer in Huntsville, Alabama. Incredible!”
That was back in 1995, fifteen years ago. It’s hard to describe the primitive networks we were operating with and more important, the lack of any common understanding about how even simple e-communications like websites and e-mail should work.
Today I’m writing this in an office in Minneapolis and I know that for certain it will be read today by at least three colleagues in Europe—two I met through Twitter, and one through a conference. What an amazing time we live in.
I’ve made many mistakes in my career as a manager—sometimes it seems like more mistakes than not. But eventually through these years I’ve latched on to the idea of “career capital,” that is, the collective good reputation and momentum one builds over time that opens new opportunities and gives one credibility.
I believe this list is a terrific framework to use in building your “career capital.”
Here’s a great example:
“Integrity means your subordinates trust you,” is rule #85. I think I’ve passed that along to other people dozens of times, and I know I’ve thought about it a million times. I think about it now as I work with new people and organizations and see how important trust is to successful projects and for personal respect.
And that’s just one example. Here’s the entire list of 100 Rules For NASA Project Managers, a present to you from Jerry Madden, one of the great citizen scholars of project management—and perhaps more important, personal integrity.
Thanks again, Jerry.
This is a presentation I made today at a terrific un-conference, the UnSummit, hosted at the CoCo co-working space in St. Paul (Thanks, Don Ball and parnters!)
I spend some time with nearly every client and engagement team I work with reviewing strategic business principles and the methods of building business models.
These days, with businesses battered by the biggest depression since the Great Depression, as well as commoditizattion and disruption, believe me “nobody knows nothing about nothing.” Businesses are searching everywhere for innovation and traction.
At many conferences I attend the focus is on user experience and the “digital channel.” I wanted to provide some simple frameworks–and some confidence–for teams to go ahead and begin asking strategic business questions and providing real business strategy backed up by clear, simple business modelling.
This is a link to my presentation on SlideShare.
I’ve added a brief bibliography of key business books that are specifically focussed on the central ideas of business planning in the 20th century and providing real, usable and simple frameworks for organizing and presenting work.
Please let me know if you have any other ideas or books to add to this:
In: mobile|user experience|ux
26 May 2010Skype has turned into one of the most essential apps on my iPhone–and it should be on yours, especially if you do any travelling.
Here’s why:
Whenever you’re somewhere in America that has poor AT&T coverage (okay, let’s put aside the notion that would be “everywhere”) Skype offers an alternative phone service. It works well with the 3G service, and even better if you’re within WiFi range.
I was visiting my family in Brookings, South Dakota last week. Brookings is a good-sized college town (20,000 pop) home to South Dakota State. While inside the city limits the AT&T coverage was fine. However, once we drove to the family home in nearby Volga, South Dakota–zippo. No signal.
My brother uses Skype as his regular phone service, and we have video calls between us several times a week. On a whim, I installed the Skype iPhone app on my phone. Sitting in the living room of the house in Volga I logged into Skype, and called my wife who was visiting in Brookings. Since the house in Volga has a WiFi network, the Skype connection was superb.
You have to set up a Skype account on your computer and buy a minimal amount of Skype points (like $10). Then go to the iTunes store, download the free Skype app, and set up the app with your Skype credentials.
A great back up phone service to have. You even get the Skype advantage of international phone calls!
And if you’re in a WiFi network, you can even use Skype’s video conferencing.
In: b2c|business strategy|change management|cloud computing|customer service|design|e-service|in-store|integration|retail|user experience|ux
7 Mar 2010
I took this photo on my last visit to Home Depot. I like to use the “self-checkout” terminal that allows you to scan the bar codes on your items and pay through a credit card pad.
The system works fine—much better than the insanely complicated one in my local grocery store. You buy some light bulbs, a jug of windshield fluid, the new doorknob for the guest room—all you have to do is scan the barcodes.
The problem the photo illustrates is that there is a fatal flaw in the system. If you scan your debit card (or like me, a bank card which is both debit and credit card) and enter your debit card PIN number, the system stops. It seems that the software to handle debit cards was never implemented.
There’s a single clerk who handles six lanes of self-service, stepping in when someone is confused, or does something out of step—or, just following the instructions on the screen, enters a PIN number.
How many times have you seen a work-around like this in a store? The system works to a point, but some function was never implemented, and it’s left to Larry the Assistant Store Manager to walk around with some duct tape and a Sharpie and tape over a button or put some over-riding message like this one on a $800 terminal running $1 million worth of POS software.
I offer this piece of customer experience to you this morning for four reasons:
We will live with these goofball work-arounds forevermore. I’d like to see the business schools and other graduate programs begin training managers in technology as one of the two or three fundamental skills they learn in school.
With the advent of cloud computing, Web services, and service-oriented architecture, we’re into a new era of systems development. If the Home Depot point of sale system for self-checkout were implemented today the Debit card problem might not have occurred.
Think of all the duct tape and Sharpies that would have saved.
In: b2c|business strategy|customer service|e-commerce|e-service|integration|retail|user experience
31 Dec 2009ForeSee Results has just released a research study on customer satisfaction with the top 40 Internet e-commerce Website and for mainstream retailers like Target and Best Buy it’s not great news.
The two retailing giants scored just below the average for the 40 sites, and showed little improvement in their customer satisfaction scores for the last four years.
Amazon continues to set the gold standard, achieving a score of 87 on a scale of 100 this year, the highest score ever achieved in the four years of the study.
So what? How does this matter if e-commerce is just a small fraction of total revenue for a mainstream retailer like Target? The study provides startling connections between customer satisfaction on the e-commerce channel and consumer likelihood to shop at stores, stay loyal to in future purchases, or recommend a retailer to others:
from: “Online Retailers Find a Reason to Celebrate in Dismal Economy,” 12/30/2009 ForeSee Results
Studies like this one point out successful strategies for understanding the inter-play between channels for the multi-channel retailer. As mobile and search play an even more important role in our consideration and buying processes, how can retailers build strong relationships and real loyalty?
“Customer satisfaction” is the answer, but what does that mean, other than the best value combined with best service? And if that’s all that means, how does a retailer get out of an “arms race” of features, price cuts, and whiz-bang promotions?
The answer may lie in a long-term strategy of what some call “delight.” Delight comes from being significantly and plesantly surprised–something that Amazon has been able to do by pioneering e-commerce experience and infrastructure on a massive scale. The key is the long-term committment to integrating bricks and clicks and mobile. This isn’t something that can be done by a cross-functional special committee. This has to be led from the top of the organization and made the central priority of a retailer.
That’s what Amazon does, doesn’t it?
I'm Rohn Jay Miller. I'm a principal in a start-up called AlphaBeta. We work with clients to evolve their business + communications strategies so they become more open, interactive and valuable in the marketplace. This means looking at how marketing, sales and customer service holistically engage customers. I write here about our challenges and opportunities.
I used to be Senior Vice President - Product + Technology, Knight Ridder Newspapers You can reach me at rmiller@alphabetadesign.com