Yesterday driving the city I noticed a big board which invited to buy a flat in a house. The interesting fact about this sell was that the is not built yet and the construction has not even started! But they have a fully visualized 3D-model of the house which you can use to imagine how your new dwelling will look like.

I doubt that anyone has any apprehensions that real estate company can and will build the house so that it will look exactly like it looks in the model (i.e. in the project). So what they are essentially doing they are selling a design, not a completely usable product. Can you imagine anyone selling a design of a software product to end-users? Or even better, can you imagine anyone buying that?

Unfortunately, in software industry we do not get that level of credibility like they do in civil engineering industry. But I do believe it is possible with of software engineering profession. If you agree with me the Professional Software Development by Steve McConnell will reassure you. If you do not agree this book will, probably, persuade you that it is possible.

Labels: Projections of life

This is actually a post by Seth Godin which I will link to from my in Projections of life series: The marine iguana.

Labels: Projections of life

Recently the food superstore I usually visit to buy food for my family introduced new size of parcels that they sell at the check out. Generally it is a good idea to offer smaller (and thus cheaper) parcels for those who do not need large ones. But let's look at this new offer from another point of view.

Earlier the dialog at the check out started with

— Do you need a parcel?
— Yes, thank you. (or No, thank you.)

And now it goes as

— Do you need a parcel?
— Yes. (or No, thank you. And that is ok.)
— Large or small one?
— Hm... Well... I guess, large one.

You see, now selling a parcel takes at least twice as much time as it did before. And the new offer that was aimed at increasing customer satisfaction those on the line are really irritated by the process of parcel selection.

In fact, the process is more than two times slower. The reason is that first question does not really require a decision from you. You kind of know beforehand whether you need the parcel. But the second question gives you choice and asks to decide. And that is where one really needs to take his time and think.

Generally speaking, choice is good when it adds real alternatives. And in that case the choice should be supported by effective decision making process so that overall efficiency is not affected.

Labels: Projections of life

Recently when I got stuck in a traffic jam I noticed a man in a car nearby me. He had his window open so I could see everything inside his car.

You know, every car has seat belts to prevent drivers and passengers from hitting the steering wheel or other elements of the front panel in case of an emergency. Of course, you must fasten your seat belt when you are in car. To remind you that modern cars have a system to warn you when you did not fasten seat belt.

Unfortunately drivers' culture in Ukraine is still low and many see fastening seat belt as a sign of weakness and do not do that even in modern cars which produce that really painful sound to warn. But how can they drive with that sound in ears, you would ask. To get rid of the sound they put the belt through the back of the seat and fasten. This way the system thinks that the belt is ok while the driver is not fastened!

And so did the driver I saw. But he need to somehow ensure his safety, so he put some small icons which you often can see in cars in Ukraine on the front panel. How can it be that a man does nothing to ensure his own safety, but expect God to do everything for him?! I guess it is in post-soviet mentality of our nation. And over time we have to get out of belief that one does not really need to work hard to build his own success, but can expect havens to just give it to him. We must quit the habit of relying on somebody else instead of taking responsibility of our own lives.

So fasten seat belt and go ahead to your success!

Labels: Projections of life

Going to REMIX'07 in Budapest I've made a 800 km journey by train through almost all of the Ukraine. To my pity every here and there along the rail-road I saw abandoned industrial buildings which are slowly ruined by rains and winds as the time goes. Such a landscape makes you even more sad if you think that 10-15 years ago some people did build those buildings for purpose. And those buildings were real accomplishments on the way to their goals. But then something changed and suddenly nobody was interested in using and keeping then. Nobody had enough courage (or vision, probably) not to build and nobody had enough persistence (or vision, again) to make real use of the building.

Now all those buildings appear to be a waste. Waste of resources, money and human energy. I'm sure you've seen such monuments of waste everywhere: on the Web, as abandoned sites, in day-to-day life, as goods or tools or whatever that were bought but never used, on the streets, as flower-beds that are no longer taken care about.

You do not have that much time and energy to invest into waste. So carry projects you start through to make sure that your efforts will not be called waste some day and start only project you really want to carry through.

Labels: Projections of life

This is actually a repeat of my older post from my old blog. But it is summer again, so why not?

Here in Ukraine you can more and more often hear people asking "How were they grown?" when they buy some vegetables. Especially when they are going to buy early vegetables that are difficult if at all possible cultivate by "usual" process and get harvest this early. What this essentially means is that people are interested in the process used to achieve the result. Why they would want to know that? Because this helps customers evaluate quality of the product. It helps customers understand internal characteristics of the product they are about to buy. And here not only the process or quality assurance procedures itself matter but also the ability to effectively communicate benefits of the process to win customers' trust is important.

The same thing happens with software development. We want to build trust relationships with our customers. But this means that we have to give them a look at what is going inside, we have to provide transparency for the customers. It is extremely difficult and sometimes very inefficient to build trust without transparency. So think twice before replying to customer's "How are you going to achieve this result?" with "Just trust us. We will do it."

More on this topic in David Anderson's post "No Trust without Transparency".

Labels: Projections of life

Every once in a while I see situations which have fairly strait forward projections on software development (and in fact other customer oriented businesses). A week and a half ago I came to my bank to order a reissue of my MasterCard Standard which was about to expire. They said that for my being a good client they can offer increased credit line. I agreed. But this operation required me close my expiring card and open a new one. Not a big deal, almost the same process as with simple reissue. So I got back home waiting for my new card. The more so I wanted to buy some books from Amazon and pay for ACM membership.

Several days ago I came to my bank again to get my new credit card. And (what a surprise!) I got MasterCard Electronic which can not be used for online payments! I asked them: why?! They said because Electronic costs $2 whereas Standard cost $5. But it can not be used for online payments! Frankly, the only value of this card for me was that I can use it to pay online. And they knew it because I came to them some time ago to relax restrictions on Internet payments for this card. After all they could have called me to ask which card I wanted, but they did not. Bank will issue a new card of required class for $5, but I will get it a week later than I originally expected. And I’m frustrated about that.

Message here is that you should know what customer expects of you and you should match his expectations. If do not know – ask him, offer him choices, help him to choose, but never make groundless assumptions that will frustrate your customer.

Labels: Projections of life

Every observation you make in day-to-day life can draw useful analogies to your professional activities. Today while I was serviced by the girl at the cash register at the super store I noticed that she wanted to optimize the process of scanning product codes. She grouped units of the same products to scan their code only once and correct quantities in the register. Theoretically this should have taken less time than scanning code of each product unit. In fact, because of this “optimization” I had to stay at the register longer that it would without optimization. Grouping of the units the same products took her very long. So although the cashier made fewer operations the whole process took longer.

The main lesson from this observation is that you should optimize the whole system (end to end sequence of steps) not separate steps or parts of process. Theory of constraints tells us that every process (or system) has a bottleneck and it is this bottleneck that should be addressed by optimization. So be sure to measure and keep an eye on performance of the whole system while optimizing.

Labels: Projections of life