All I want is a tv

My mother in law came to visit and was shocked at the primitive audio visual support we provided to her while she was here.

We have a cool music system (speaker to plug ipods into) and we have access to free to air television.  But she was disappointed by the thick, cumbersome and rather small tv we are forced to put up with.

In fact even our talk about the WFC (ie recession with good marketing) and our claim that we are living in poverty did not avert her obvious disappointment that her daughter was living with a shameful lack of modern viewing technologies.  How could my mother in law bring people to visit if she had to actively keep them out of the tv room to hide the families shame.

So my wife and I discussed things and agreed that she was right … and went out to rectify things.

By skipping sushi and yum cha we have raised the capital needed and we did some initial research.  We found out that you need digital and either plasma or lcd.   So far so good.

But now we have discovered that very few people can survive without at least 42″ of viewing pleasure.  And most happy couples report that their relationship is based on respect, making time for fun, honesty and a tv that is at least 46″.

Sadly we then found out that to have a 46″ tv you need a bigger room than we have or you go blind.  So now we need an extension to make the room suitable, or we need to go back  to a small tv.  But digital tv also fades sometimes so we might need to update our cruddy old ariel.

I will let you know if we resolve these dilemmas but in the meantime I think I will find a broker who can assess our needs and then go and source the optimum tv.  The analysis alone seems to be beyond us

 

Red dust

When I woke up yesterday I looked outside to see a spectacular sunrise.

Then as I walked to the train it was almost like being in a scifi movie. There was dust all over the cars, trees had a red tinge to them and the sky had a dark Armageddon like look to it.

It was all pretty cool.

Today, our car was covered in dust, the tv had somehow become covered in red dust, as was the bookcase and some of the other furniture.

That was less cool and less fun.

So next time Sydney has a giant dust storm I think we should hold it “offsite” or only have dust blow in that lasts for a day before disappearing of its own accord.

With those minor enhancements though, this freaky weather was a cool idea – and certainly better than the giant wave of bogon moths we had a few years ago.

So thanks to the weather gods or the weather bureau or whoever is responsible for these things. It was certainly gave us a helping hand in our small talk when we wanted to talk about the weather.

 

Even dinosaurs have brand consultants now days

I read in the paper that we have discovered a new Australian dinosaur.  The first thing I noticed was that he/she is far more colourful than dinosaurs discovered in previous years.

I am not sure of the sophisticated techniques scientists use to see the patterns and skin tones of a fossil, so I may be jumping to conclusions.  But I suspect the colouring is more to do with the “new” dino’s PR team.  The dinosaur appears well muscled, trim and quite similar to the cooler set seen in Jurassic park.

Even the name is marketing genius.  To his friends (regular fans and groupies) he has the approachable name of “Banjo” (I am now assume he is a he because I don’t think Banjo is a girl’s name, but again I am just assuming).

Beyond this though, his name is Austra-lovenator.  I can’t think of a cooler name for an ancient beast than “the lovenator”.

All the other dinosaurs must be getting back to their agents this week to either try to get associated with him or rush out some of their own press.  But they are too late.  The Lovenator’s website already has him pictured next to a Charlie’s angel like silhouette of a woman he is chatting to at some undisclosed nightclub; he already has the name and he is breaking new territory with his his modern styling and colour scheme.

Kudos to his team and sympathy to the old dinosaurs who look they will soon be going the way of the dinosaurs if they can’t grasp the concept that brand is everything to the modern dinosaur.

 

Innovative marketing strategy

Here is a test of you creative, innovative thinking and your common sense.

My brother in law came to stay with us while he was in Sydney.  I noticed a surprisingly large tag on his bag which my sister had put there.  All it had on it was a large A-K but, I am told, it really stands out when you are waiting for your bag.

So here is my new and unpatented advertising idea.  If you travel a lot and are a trainer/consultant, why not put a giant business card on your bag as a tag.  Or why not run some ads in large baggage tags.  Lots of potential clients are standing around board and just watching you bag go around anyway.

I will let you know if I try it and gain any clients.  In the meantime you can decide if it appeals to you creative and innovative mind … or if you common sense tells you that the idea is just plain silly

 

Published my first article on my business blog

Hey guys

I have created a new blog to focus on business and consulting information to maintain the purity of the obscure comments and chaotic thinking of this, my personal blog.

If you want to have a look at my new blog, this is the first article I have published - http://kingsinsight.com/2009/09/02/modelling-the-choices-we-make/

You should see a new articlethere  every Monday night, and a new one here everytime a someone mentions that Pluto is still a planet.

 

Yet another reminder that the future is already here

I was running a workshop on continuous improvement and lean approaches yesterday.

One of the examples I like to use in explaining effective processes is to talk about coffee shops and the way they serve (hopefully) good quality quickly to a large number of people.

So I was amazed to find in the coffee shop where I got my coffee that I could pay via SMS. So I order my coffee and then instead of giving them cash I just sms a particular number with “pay ___ $x”.

Its a small coffee shop at a train station so I was amazed that they had this technology set up. But then I remembered that they don’t need to build the technology, they just need to exploit it.

 

My new wise old saying

I have been using some of my grandma’s wise old folk sayings when running Agile workshops and courses lately.

So it was interesting when I went to a talk by Catherine DeVrye (a great author on customer service) that she had a wide range of traditional sayings to apply to modern issues in customer service.

So, while I was reading one of her books on the train home, I had an inspirational moment where I invented my own wise “old” saying.

With apologies to people who have probably invented it before, my new motto for at least the next month is …

Setbacks are inevitable, but opportunities are optional.

 

Iteration 0 yum cha

Heres an odd idea I heard recently. In iteration zero, we are getting everything set up to run our cool new project. But tracking things can be hard.

So, what if the project manager only tracks the team wide needs like a development server or meeting room.

Then each team member gets given a yum cha card and needs to go and get a stamp for each thing they have set up for them (laptop, desk, role definition, login to team wiki etc).

I am not sure whether its innovative or just a little odd.

 

Another customer service improvement opportunity

Since we live in Australia, we use Australia Post to deliver our mail.

We have generally been really happy with them, even if we take them for granted.  So when our mail seemed to be disappearing in the post (someone chased up an unpaid bill, two organisations seemed to fail to send us things) we didn’t believe it.

Eventually my wife noticed that some days no mail came when she was expecting quite a bit.  She then noticed that our mail was on the front lawn once and in our garden once.

So we ontacted Australia Post.  They told us that we had a bad letter box and that we needed to replace it.   Apparently, as they understood it, postal workers in Australia only need to deliver mail if they can do so one handed.

With our bad letter box it was necessary to lift the top up and put mail in the box.  So we were told to repair this and things would be fine.

However we decided to lodge a formal complaint and a request for a two handed postman.

Mail kept disappearing and we were told that it would take some weeks to investigate our complaint.

Eventually, I got a phone call from my wife that helped explain what might be a contributing factor.  She was watching the news on TV and saw a report about a mailman being arrested.

The news report went on to say that the mailman for (our supburb and two neibouring ones) had been arrested because he was not delivering mail.  Police had investigated after a wave of complaints from residents and had found that the postman had simply taken the mail home on several occaissions.  He appears to be disturbed rather than fraudulent because 5,000 letters were found unopened in his house.

Apparently (we think) he just went home when he was having a bad day.

We thought this was a reasonable explanation, but we thought that the post office should now get back to us to let us know they were closing our complaint and had rectified the problem.

But there was one more twist.  We wondered if the mail the police found would now be delivered or if it would be tied up in the court system as evidence.  We also thought it would be good to have a letter from Austalia Post letting us know what happened so if we have someone upset with our lack of response to them, we can give them a copy of the letter to back up our hard to believe claim that “your letter probably got lost in the mail”.

Sadly this is where Australia Post let us down.  Unfortunately they are not able to confirm that our complaint was rectified, nor that there was any police incident.  They have been told that they cannot say anything about a potential issue.

They did let slip that they have no intention of cataloguing the letters that were alledgedly at the postman’s house because its not their problem.  But even when told that they are now discussing details of a case they claim not to know about they said they suddenly remembered that they know nothing about it.

So … no letter of explanation …. no apology … no helpful tip on how long it might be before residents get their mail … and no notification to those who did not see the news.  If our neighbours are upset with some company for failing to send them a promissed letter then Australia Post are hoping they never work out the postal system is at fault.

We would not have sued them for an apology and if we were going to sue them then we still would, using the court case where a postman was charged as strong evidence that mail did not get delivered.

A little accountability and a short explanation would probably have given us and our neighbours a lot more confidence in Australia Post.  Instead they have decided to let the neighbours gossip about missing mail and postman being arrested until the story grows and their brand cops a lot of damage.

I am sure that Australia Post have a highly paid PR team that are much more experienced with these things than I am. but now each time we see an ad for the post office or we here someone talk about them we have a story to tell.  And it is not the “They are so good that the only time they mucked up they actually wrote to us because they were both surprised and concerned” kind of good PR story that it could have been.

 

BAs on Agile projects

You might have already read Shane Hastie’s article on analysts and agile project approaches.  He commented that it might be a good idea to have a BA on an agile project.

http://www.infoq.com/articles/agile-business-analyst-role

Some of the responses he got were supportive and some suggested that actually agile projects can go faster when the developers take over the work of the BA and remove “the middleman”.

I had a couple of related conversations this week though that suggested that sometimes the developers are, while coding faster, not actually doing a good job of focussing on the real solution.

One organisation has recognised an issue that some of their (evil?) agile projects are rolling out software that is not ready to be supported and does not include user manuals.  This is apparently due to an extremist view of the Agile Maniftesto that concludes that documentation is evil and thus support documentation is not needed when we are Agile.

Talking to people at that organisation we uncovered a radical theory that some agile projects should be rolling our complete business solutions rather than just “software code that works”.  Our new interpretation of the Agile Manifesto is that it actually supports working software – ie software that works well when implemented in the real world.

Fresh with this new information I went to see some people at another organisation and they mentioned that their BAs are a bit worried about their careers if they don’t get to produce quality documents.  I rattled off my standard answer that  BAs deal in communication rather than documents and that they will still be popular on Agile projects.  But then I remembered some of the comments in response to Shane’s article … and I asked myself what a BA should really do on an Agile project.

The answer seemed so obvious it was worth writing a long article about it

In agile projects (whether established for good or evil) we often have a project manager (or scum master, or iteration manager) to organise things.  And we have a product owner (or customer, or business guy) to keep us focussed on what the customer actually wants.  We then have a squad of developers to build cool stuff and a tester or two to make sure we remember some quality and risk management along the way.

But our solutions are often so complicated that we find it worth appointing a solution architect (or tech lead, or lead engineer) to help with our technical direction.  He/she then helps to

- Ensure the application integrates into the existing organisational application and infrastructure ecosystem;

- Help and guide the technical design and approach; and

- Help the project develop a good technical solution through models, understanding, collaboration and guru-ness.

But some Agile projects only build code when they should have built a bigger solution.  And some Agile projects exist in a world where the busines integration and design actually gets more complicated than the technical design and itegration.

So it follows that it is sometimes worth building more than software.  And it follows that we might benefit from having a “business architect” to

- Ensure the application integrates into the existing business ecosystem;

- Help and guide the link between the cool application stuff and the business solution design and approach; and

- Help the project develop a good business solution thought models, understanding, collaboration and guru-ness.

But then, of course, this is what business analysts do.  So maybe we should retire our Agile business analysts and replace them with more highly paid Business Architects.  These new beasts will be like BAs, but will be paid more and will be able to coordinate between process groups, trainers, business users and other “technical” groups.