|
|
Peter Hanlon's Blog
-
Well you'd be forgiven for thinking so given the name, but the queues I'm referring to are those at the supermarket checkouts rather than network traffic, which is how queuing theory originally developed. Queues are bad. Really bad. They literally cost you money. One of the principles of queue theory is that once a queue forms it has to be managed, which requires resources, then you need over capacity at some point, in order to reduce the length of the queue. Often the resource to manage the queue comes from very thing serving the queue. This means the queue gets processed even more slowly than before the queue started and the queue gets longer. It doesn't start to get shorter until you have over capacity. Retail queues cost money in all kinds of ways and often those costs are hidden, or at least not immediately apparent. Long queues lead to customer dissatisfaction and ultimately to lost customers. Losing customers obviously isn't a good thing and will cost you money in the long run, and it's in this respect that most people associate the cost of queueing. (Queueing, incidentally, is the only word in the English language to contain 5 consecutive vowels) Some less obvious ways that queues cost money involve - In a supermarket, the space kept clear between the checkouts and the start of the aisles is valuable space that is being used to manage queues instead of being used as shelf space.
- Two delivery lorries arriving at a store/depot at the same time cost money in waiting time.
- Or a more trivial example, taking a ticket at the meat counter involves the cost of the little yellow tickets and the dispenser
Understandably therefore, minimising queues is top priority, and as something that has big impact on customer dissatisfaction, it's something of a PR tool in the supermarket wars. The trade off is balancing the cost of resources used to prevent queues, vs the cost of the queue itself. Having all checkouts open all the time would go a long way to easing congestion in the store, but that has to weighed up against the retail wage budget, (the single biggest expense for a large retailer), used to pay all of those checkout operators required to ensure no queues. Retailers understand this trade off and have developed complex systems to help them manage queues, something that the average shopper trying gauge whether aisle 19 (short queue, but inefficient operator) is better than aisle 20 (longer queue but smaller basket size) probably doesn't appreciate. (Fuzzy logic might help here!) Space in store is critical and the retail wage budget is massive, so what looks like large investment can be easily offset by the cost of real savings in either of those areas. You might like to ponder this next time your stuck in a checkout queue, It's something I can't help myself doing... (My personal favourite is the Wilkinson's dot matrix receipt printer, which takes something like 15 seconds to print your receipt. Whilst laser printer are more expensive, the retail wage budget saving, at roughly a quarter to half a million pounds per second, I'm sure would massively outweigh the investment) You can apply Queue theory in loads of different ways (another favourite of mine is NHS waiting lists). In a later post I'll talk about how I've used queue theory to revamp a large data warehouse batch schedule..
|
-
I've blogged on the benefits of bringing together BI and UCD before (User Centred Design and Business Intelligence), and how this can be used to differentiate us from the crowd. Recently we've been involved in delivering a proof of concept BI application, against two other contenders in the BI marketplace. Our approach was to focus on the requirements and needs of the business, rather than showcasing the whistle and bells associated with a particular technology, and to bring in to play the Conchango creative genius to make the whole thing look and feel fantastic. The idea being to demonstrate that, better than anyone; - We know Retail
- We design great solutions that people love
I'm delighted to say that we kicked ass, and beat the other two providers to the contract, proving in the process that our User Centred Design approach can have a role to play outside of web and digital media projects and can be used to reinforce our proposition in the other areas that we excel in. Fantastic, well done to everyone involved! Right, where next ?? Two things stand out for me from this experience, that reinforce the two bullet points above. Firstly, we focused on the business requirements. Obvious OK!?, and the consulting equivalent to reading the question paper in an exam. It's too easy to go all gimmicky when doing a proof of concept and to show every single aspect of functionality, working them in a contrived manner. The technology guys here wanted to do just that but our experience of deploying Business Intelligence applications in retail tells us that buyers and merchandiser want numbers, they don't want dials and gauges. (Incidentally, the client also knew this and the requirements explicitly stated no petrol gauges) We still had to convince the technical product guys that this was the right approach to take Secondly, the creative guys that helped us with the project had never worked on a BI project before. The workflow was completely new and therefore the user journey aspect was created from scratch. The guys had no experience of the BI tools that we were using. Being tools, they only have limited scope for customisation and configuration around 'Look and feel'. So we end up in the position of having a thousand fantastic ideas on how to take the application forward, but not having the ability to get in their and make it happen. Instead we had to cut back on where our imagination was taking us and make the best use of what was possible. Contracts have been signed and we've now started the project in earnest. I expect us to meet more of those challenges while we try and work out how we do UCD and BI together, but from the success of the proof of concept, we know it's the right approach to be taking. We'll just have to take them in our stride, which is something we all do very well here at Conchango...
|
-
I've been frustrated recently by being surrounded by some 'Old Skool' supplier management techniques. I've always worked in Retail so I'm used to being in environments with very strong purchasing backgrounds, and suppliers being driven hard on deals. However, recent events have left me exasperated to the point of writing this. The recent examples involves insuring yourself against failure to deliver by a supplier, which I think everyone would agree is a good thing. You can do this in a number of ways and permutations. Two approaches at opposite ends of the spectrum are, having bullet proof contracts that claw back money or services in the event of failure, at one end, or being pro-active and putting processes and resources in place to prevent the failure ever happening, at the other. The former appears to cost you less, you get money back for any issues and you don't pay for anyone in a QA type role etc. and therefore seems quite attractive. I've also seen this create the 'big man effect' in those people who suddenly find themselves in a position to throw some weight around, which adds to the attractiveness for some. I feel this approach is short sighted and tends to focus on cash rather than value. It ignores the opportunity cost, or cost of failure. Organisations who take this approach would do well to remember why they embarked on those projects in the first place. Generally (I know there are some exceptions) business undertakes new projects to add value, get a return on investment, call it what you will, spend some money, get more money back (lots more hopefully!). Or in the case of service, spend on support, to prevent issues happening that will cost you lots more. So, if we're doing projects because we want to make more money, then any failure or delay, not only costs the additional sum to rectify the problem, but also costs the lost opportunity from delivering the project. In today's rapidly changing technology world, these opportunity costs can be enormous. Here at Conchango we've had the opportunity to work on cutting edge projects that have delivered massive returns on investment. You can read about these here. My experience is to avoid this type of approach like the plague and take a more collaborative approach, more partner than supplier. Shared vision, shared objectives, collaborative teams, which is also how Conchango like to work. It's one of the reasons I joined. If you feel the same way, then maybe you'd like to Join us too. Organisations that take the former approach, hiding behind contracts in the event of failure, can create a blame culture, where everyone is covering their back. Avoiding blame and responsibility becomes the primary driver. Organisations who embrace the partnership philosophy set themselves up for success, the culture of the organisation becomes based on success. Delivery becomes key and everyone internally and 3rd party is focused on this. Because they're focused on the value of delivery. failure is just not an option....
|
-
Tesco opens up another front on the green supermarket war today, by announcing that products will now be labelled with their individual carbon footprint. Tesco are hot on the heels of Marks and Spencer who stole a march on their rivals to lead the sector on green credentials, by being the first to charge for carrier bags. A move that sounds as good for business as it does for the environment. Tesco is to become the world’s first supermarket group to launch a major trial of carbon labelling on its own-brand products. The Carbon Reduction Label developed by the Carbon Trust will soon appear on 20 Tesco products in four different categories: laundry detergent, orange juice, potatoes and light bulbs.... Read the full press release here. Product level carbon labelling was bound to happen sooner or later, and I don't take any credit for predicting it here some weeks ago. Whether this takes off or not, and leads to a genuine reduction in the production of CO2, only time will tell. It's easy to think that people will see this and think twice about which product to buy, searching and substituting for greener alternatives. That might certainly be true of hardened environmentalists but for the ordinary shopper this additional dimension of choice may not come in to play very much at all. Today's ordinary shopper has a vast array of choice in picking between variants of a similar product. On top of the traditional hard-core options of brand and price, we can opt in for healthy eating (Be good to yourself), quality (Finest, Taste the Difference), ethics (Fairtrade), organic (inc non GM) to name but a few. How 'carbon' as an option competes amongst these existing choices will be interesting to see. i.e. High Carbon but Fairtrade vs Low Carbon non Fairtrade etc. Whilst I might be questioning the effectiveness of carbon labelling in driving consumer choice, what I think is more certain is that labelling of products will drive down the carbon footprints via the suppliers. Some suppliers will want to be seen at the cutting edge of green manufacturing and will lead the reduction in Carbon values. For those that don't want to lead from the front, they won't want to get at the back of the back either. Once product level carbon measurement becomes more common, it won't be long before the media start running column inches and documentaries exposing high polluting suppliers. Whilst consumers might find it hard to differentiate products, on the basis of their green credentials, at the shelf edge. They might find it easier to do from the comfort of their living room...
|
-
5p for Carrier bags, good for the environment and good for business... Today, Marks & Spencer begin charging 5p for food carrier bags. That's good for the environment because alongside the reduction in plastic that will be sent to landfill, the profit from the sale of the bags will go to Groundwork, an environmental charity which creates and improves green spaces across the UK. In preparation for this, M&S have been giving away free Bags for Life over the last month, with 15 Million given away so far. Customers will now be able to choose either a 5p food carrier or a Bag for Life costing 10p, to take their shopping home in. This is all part of Marks and Spencer's Plan A initiative which commits to, amongst others, reducing carrier bag usage by a third and to sending no waste to landfill by 2012. With those free Bags for life costing £1.5M, how can that be good for business? Of course the key word in the above paragraph is profit. 'All of the profit from the sale of the bags'. Officially, that means 1.85p from the sale of single use food carrier bags will be donated to Groundwork. That's a nice 3.15p recouped per bag for M&S, which previously was bearing the costs of the plastic bags. So aside from the benefits of all the positive publicity, column inches, air time etc. On top of the competitive advantage gained by making the first move and being seen to set the standard for sustainability within the retail sector. You get to wipe out a very sizeable revenue charge in one fell swoop and get sector leading green credentials at the same time. Now that's good business!
|
-
Conchango recently hosted a Retail Business Intelligence Seminar, which was attended by many of the UK's leading retailers. The format of the day was a number of presentations and some round table discussions on topics that had been selected by the attendees in advance by way of a questionnaire. The Butler group presented on the leading topics of the day within business intelligence and we heard from our own David Ellis on web performance management. Corporate Social Responsibility reporting, colloquially referred to as 'Green' reporting, was one of the latter topics of the day for the round table discussion. Green credentials are obviously top of the agenda at C-level of the top retailers and are filtering their way down the organisational hierarchy. IT departments haven't yet got to grips with this in any serious way although departments like Marketing are in full swing, which is why we're all familiar with stories about Marks and Spencer, who are soon to start charging for carrier bags as part of their Plan A initiative, but in the meantime have been giving away free 'Bags for Life'. Sainsbury's have dipped their toe in the 'free Bag for Life' water too. Tesco of course are in on the act with the Future Store initiative, check it out next time you're in Wick (!), and have installed, reputedly, the worlds largest solar panel roof at their Fresh and Easy distribution centre in the US. The discussion at the table rounded very squarely at one point on 'Are they doing it for money or because they care for the planet?'. Unanimously, instantly, 'for the money!' was the response. Was I the only person slightly disappointed by this response? Or have I bought into the marketing message and believe they do care after all? Who knows? but later when I reflected back on this, I thought, 'If they are in it for the money, in what directions could they take it?' If you shop with a Tesco, and use your clubcard, then Tesco will know every item you buy. Tesco could therefore work out an individuals customers green credentials from the products they buy, assuming they work out individual product greenness, which surely is a first step. They'll already use some Fuzzy definition of greenness probably linked to a measure of ethicalness for segmentation purposes, but this will allow a whole new measure of granularity. Doing this would of course give rise to opportunities to up-sell people to more 'green' products, that as well as espousing their green credentials, probably cost more and have a greater margin. This has profit implications but also huge customer satisfaction potential. Imagine how powerful Tesco online shopping could be if you could be presented with greener alternatives to those Kenyan strawberries, right there on the page? This has the added advantage of being applicable to all customers for as we have all heard, there are those vocal customer groups who shun the mighty clubcard for big brother reasons. For the many who carry one though, (13.5 Million), I wouldn't be surprised if they actually wanted Tesco to go this far. Why try and work out your own carbon footprint when someone else can do it for you? As I stated above, 'Green' is big at C-level and has slowly started filtering down, at some point in the near future green credentials will filter it's way into mainstream BI. Expect more blogs on this in the future....
|
-
Hi
It's been a while since my last post and this has been sitting on my laptop for months.
One of the things which has troubled me in my life as a consultant is the “Project activity – needs versus blame” conundrum.
Let me describe in a bit more detail what I am trying to get at.
Example
We are working a project to build a new datawarehouse. We need to get a load of data from a bunch of different legacy systems and to do this we need our client to provide us with the schemas for these systems and information on what it all means so we can do a data mapping exercise before we build our new DWH schema and ETL jobs.
However due to our client being under-resourced the nominated person doesn’t have time to do this for us. As a result one of our consultants steps in to do the work. He then, because he is not able to get enough time with the experts, makes a number of errors which we find out in UAT. Costly rework ensues pushing the delivery date back, makes us look like mugs and causes us to lose money by going over budget.
So what do we do about it?
As consultants we have a general reputation (deserved or not!) of being all-knowing, all-seeing and can-do it all. I know some people probably disagree with that statement but I think the implicit deal that many of our clients buy into is that if they pay us a lot of money we will take their problems away from them and return back to them beautiful solutions. And most consultants out there really do want this.
We generally are very focused on delivering things because we have to! That’s what we are paid and judged on.
So the problem we have here is a task that our client really needs to do for us remains undone. The PM (and the rest of the team) is in a catch 22. Do we stop work (effectively) and point the finger at our client? Or do we do the work ourselves at the risk of getting it wrong, taking too long, doing something that we don’t have the time for?
It’s a very difficult discussion to have to try to justify yourself to a client when they see a poor quality delivery AND have to pay more money for it.
I think often that many clients do not really understand what developing a new software decision will mean for them in their day to day work. To get it right requires a huge amount of involvement from them which will mean often that they struggle to do their day jobs.
So how can consultants get around this problem? It’s really not easy and requires a fair bit of courage and honesty on the part of you and your client.
I think the key is communication. This is something that Agile stresses but I don’t think it's limited to just Agile. I think it’s important to any consultant and project whether its waterfall, agile or something else.
It needs to start at project inception and both sides need to agree on what is going to be required from the other to complete the work, write it down and refer to it through the course of the project. At this point we should be saying to our clients that if either party feels that the other is not holding up their side of the bargain then it should be raised immediately.
Next thing is to keep talking through the course of the project, make sure that the client is aware of what’s happening all the time and doesn’t get surprised. This can be with email or just a quick chat by the coffee machine. If they are too busy to see you as much as you’d like then send them an email…they just might read it.
Another thing to do is to try to ensure that you have a good relationship with other senior stakeholders as we all want to avoid single points of failure! On any project but especially large ones we, as project managers, need to set up a strong governance structure so we can raise problems in a controlled environment. And just on the covering your bases we should be conscious that we are always in a sale process. Keeping the bigger picture of another phase can help us the see a bit more clearly what we should be doing at any one time.
It really boils down to agreeing just what the responsibilities are, make sure you agree to this upfront and if it needs to change then make sure we get this written down. When you write this down make sure the risks of this change are documented as well.
So if we do the work and make a mistake or take too long we can turn to our client in the spirit of honesty and partnership and have a proper, grown up conversation instead of getting a battering from our client and our own management.
|
-
Isn't searching for a house online addictive? You spend hours and hours at the computer, changing sites, varying search parameters, taking virtual tours etc. If your seriously moving then you do this every day so you can catch the latest properties. Is it addictive? Or does it just take hours because traditional housing search engines just don't work like we need them too? In my experience, In order to find that dream house, you need to enter parameters so wide that hundreds of properties are returned, almost all unsuitable and your left to trawl through each one looking for the one or two possibilities. In this day and age shouldn't the computer be doing that? Yes! It's my belief that house hunting search engines are fundamentally flawed because they use boolean logic. Things are either true or false, 1 or 0. A house either has 4 bedrooms or it doesn't. It's priced under £400K or it isn't. But searching for a house isn't a true or false search. You may want 4 bedrooms, but a 3 bed house with room for an extension might be ok if the other factors were also strong. Boolean logic can't cope with this. Things get much worse when you add more and more search parameters in i.e. detached, 4 beds, 400K, Drive, Garage, study. Let's look at two approaches. If you AND these factors together then only houses that have all 6 will be returned, unlikely. If you OR these together and rank on number of matches (like a search engine) then you typically get hundreds of houses returned. I think you'd get much better results if your search applied fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic deals with degrees of truth, rather than absolutes. Rather than a yes or no, it's under 400K or not, yes or no. Its a 'yes, nearly, not quite, not really, no' type of thing. Rather than looking at criteria as pass or fail, 1 or 0, Fuzzy Logic scores them and come up with a holistic view. You score the search against the parameters and include near misses. Estate agents would argue they been doing this for years, and given the increasing trend to do away with estate agents, they'd be wise to press this angle. If your estate agent is good you might get a call like this? "Hello Mr Hanlon, its Laura from the Estate Agents. We've got a new property on the market that I think you may be interested in. It hasn't got the 4 beds that you wanted but it's in a really great location, large back garden, drive for 5 cars and the possibility to extend. I thought you might be interested. Give me a ring back when you can" The estate agent here used fuzzy logic to judge that whilst this property didn't tick the boxes exactly, it scored highly across a number of categories to warrant looking at. How many people have ever given something 9.5 out of ten? or used a rule of thumb? All of these are examples of fuzzy logic in action. Our brains see things as shades of grey, rather than black or white. So how does this all relate to Business Intelligence? Well it's one reason why dashboard reporting can miss the mark. OK but what do we learn from this.? Estate agents could re-learn from retailers that's it's important to listen to your customer and give them what they want. They have the edge over search engines and they should work hard to exploit it. Fuzzy logic is the way all things in the future will work. More of this later...
|
-
Traditional BI was all about numbers, charts and reports and it's been replaced by super whizzy dashboards that promise the earth but may or may not deliver value. BI applications, along with email, are probably the only system that senior executives of companies actually use. As such they have visibility that's unrivalled from other IT areas and therefore why not make them a showcase of IT. A User Centred Design ( UCD ) approach can deliver a look and feel that exceeds peoples expectations, whilst avoiding the temptation to play with technology and overload on 'gimmicky' sliders and gauges. Taking the time to sit down to map and understand the user journey can change the whole design of an application and deliver something that's really usable and adds value. But isn't that just capturing the business requirements? No, it goes beyond that. Understanding what the next move needs to be at each point creates new opportunities to link in deeper analysis, link to operational systems to action items as they are identified, memo issues so that they can be referred to later or trigger workflow tasks on the fly. Then have all of that designed by someone with years of experience in graphic design so that it looks fantastic. If you thought about it , why would you let a programmer design a front end that goes in front of the CEO? Fantastic, I'll take two. Well, it's not that easy. Working with BI tools isn't the blank canvas that you have with traditional uses of UCD such as web design. The tools have bounds and limits that you can't go beyond, and varying degrees of customisation. At the top end you could re-skin app's published in Sharepoint and have breathtaking state of the art look and feel. At the other end of the spectrum, you can make seemingly simple layout and design changes that transform mediocre reports into clean, professional, visually appealing documents that speak quality. We use highly skilled IT professionals to build BI app's, shouldn't we use highly skilled Creative professionals to design them?
|
-
Traditional BI is about numbers, charts and reports right? Big mainframe reporting systems using Focus or SAS, or even COBOL (those were the days, PIC S9(9) COMP-3, happy memories!!). Or early implementations of Microstrategy or Business Objects that looked good in their day, but seem out of place now. The trend with technology companies for a few years now has been to make this front end graphical and 'fancy', and to sell the concept of a dashboard. Tools like Business Objects Excelsius and Microsoft Performance Point Server two examples of the leaders. One can't but help get the feeling though that technology has got ahead of the business requirements. Sure, we've all come to expect fancy graphics, but if these don't add any business value then what you end up with is 'gimmicky', 'fun' tools, that don't really add anything above charts and reams of numbers, or worse, deliver less. Charts after all did do the job for decades. People like the dashboard concept because it promises summarised, easily understandable, relevant, actionable information. It's too easy though to under deliver on this promise. The idea that we can define rules that highlight exceptions, so that time spent analysing numbers is minimised and people are presented with the answer, is an attractive one but not one based on reality. 'Retail is Detail' so the saying goes and reading a retailers trading reports is not a simple business, if it was, buyers would have been replaced with Quants developing algorithms to manage the entire buy/supply process, and I'm not aware of any retailer doing this, or even remotely near it. But let's not lose heart. That doesn't mean we can't get dashboards working. We need to concentrate on the business requirements and the business value and avoid the temptation to 'play' with technology. We can and should make the applications look good, processes like User Centred Design can add very significant value. BI applications, along with email, are probably the only system that senior executives of companies actually use. As such they have visibility that's unrivalled from other IT areas and therefore why not make them a showcase of IT. Charts have their place and we need to play on their strengths and build in functionality that enhances them rather than supercedes them. Too often the temptation with dashboards is to hide charts behind petrol gauges and sliders, why not have the chart of numbers as the centre piece and use it as the entry point into graphs, charts and deeper analysis.
|
|
|
|