Managing Expectations

I got a support call the other day from a customer -- they hadn't yet received their license file, and were wondering where it was. In these days of instant online purchases, I suppose I might wonder too. How come it takes so long to get a license file? For new readers, this might come as a surprise, but Quma is a one-man operation... and for most of Quma's existence, it's been a part-time operation as well. As a result, I have to make tradeoffs when it comes to running the business. Among those tradeoffs is the balance between development, and business process automation. Where will my time best be spent? So far, it hasn't made much sense to automate the order processing side of things because there are not that many orders. So, each order is manually entered into our order database, and each license file is created 'by hand' using tools I wrote to generate the license files. Since Quma is a part-time occupation, those orders get processed in the evening.

I hesitated to compose this entry, but one management activity that has merit is the management of expectations. From my perspective, I think I'm fairly accessible for support issues, and am responsive to support requests, etc. But my perspective may not be the same as someone who is expecting something that I cannot provide... so in the hopes of managing expectations...:

In general, I respond to e-mail support requests from anyone within 24 hours. Precedence is given to customers, but sales support is available. Orders are processed within 24 hours, with the caveat that I can only process an order after I receive it. Sometimes NorthStar and/or RegSoft are slow in forwarding orders to me which can lead to delays. If you need support, I much prefer e-mail to phone support. If you do call, you'll typically be reaching me at my day job. I won't be in front of a computer, and so may not be able to provide a useful answer from memory... so please use e-mail if you can. The forums are useful, but you need to email me in order get approval to post to the forums -- I do this to prevent forum spam, which would otherwise be a major waste of my time.

Make it easy to do the right thing...

One of the goals of good user interface design is to make it easy to do the right thing, and conversely, difficult to do the wrong thing. So the goal at Quma is to always make the right thing to do the easy thing to do. I don't always succeed, but that goal is usually in mind when adding some new feature, etc.

This same rule-of-thumb can apply also to institutions: good institutions make it easy to do the right thing, and difficult (or costly) to do the wrong thing.

Things go bad when you make it easy to do the wrong thing since most people choose to do the easy thing whether it's right or wrong. In software, there are typically few horrible consequences if the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do – though I'm sure there are counter examples. In an institutional setting, making it easy to do the wrong thing can produce evil results. Among the horrific examples of this – imagine that you're a German citizen living during the WWII era. You're not some leader type, you're just a common Joe, trying to stay alive. The Nazis come to power, you're drafted, and now find yourself assigned to guard duty at Auschwitz. You thank your lucky stars you don't have to fight the Russians on the Eastern front. And then you're given the order to herd the Jews into the ovens. Here is an institutional setting where the easy thing to do (obey the order) is the wrong thing to do. Very few of us possess the moral fortitude to disobey – How many of the guards in the concentration camps knew they were doing the wrong thing, but chose to do the easy thing instead? The easy choice was to commit genocide; the difficult choice was to disobey and face an uncertain future -- either immediate death, or a trip to the Eastern front. The institutional framework was all screwed up.

A less horrific example from today's economic headlines – many bankers/lenders were aware of the sub-prime lending problem, and yet many of them chose to do the easy thing – continue to make bad loans. The bankers are not particularly stupid or evil – they are like most of the rest of us: when faced between a choice to do the right thing, vs. doing the easy thing, they chose the easy thing. The thing wrong with this picture is that the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do. I'm not sure I could articulate all the wrong turns made that have put our instutions in their present state -- where in so many instances the easy thing to do is the wrong thing to do -- but it bears thinking about. If we're to ever get out of our current mess, one important step on the road to recovery will be to alter the design of our institutions so that doing the right thing is the same as doing the easy thing.

The Jean Dixon Effect

As our economic meltdown continues, it's worth stepping aside for some perspective.

I have no idea where the markets are heading. Professional pundits are paid to make predictions about where the markets are headed. Some of those pundits will actually be correct. Does this mean they genuinely understand the dynamics of the situation, or are they no better than the broken clock that is correct twice a day? I don't know the answer to that either.

I find it helpful to put pundits in perspective by invoking what I have come to call the 'Jean Dixon Effect'. For those of you old enough to recall, Jean Dixon  was a psychic who predicted the assassination of Kennedy. She became famous after Kennedy was shot, and some folks then began to think that she actually knew what she was talking about.

When markets move this way or that way, there will always be some market analyst who was on the correct side of that move. The talking heads then trot out their new found expert to get that expert's opinion on where the market will go in the future. Will that new expert be correct or incorrect? The Jean Dixon Effect causes us to view that expert with a less critical eye than we otherwise might.

As I think about this some more, we are also victims of the converse of the Jean Dixon Effect -- we ascribe misplaced expertise to those whose actions have demonstrated failure after failure. It's almost embarrassing to look at the predictions of soundness and stability earlier offered up by some of our leaders. Witness the early testimony of Paulson and Bernanke (say back in March of this year) on how fundamentals were just fine, etc., etc. The converse of the Jean Dixon Effect allows us to listen to these guys and still grant them some level of credibility.

The big question that I don't know the answer to: What will the Chinese do?

Ignoring Sycophants

Suppose you're some rich/powerful person. How do you prevent being surrounded by sycophants. Communication between two people is difficult and often leads to misunderstanding. Effective communication between different levels of a hierarchy is even more difficult. How does a Bill Gates or a George Bush get an accurate picture of what is really going on?

Almost by definition, they can only talk to people who are already in their orbit... people who may be just as much out of touch with reality. I suppose they must come to rely on gathering information from more impersonal sources -- e.g. reading articles, books, etc. where the author isn't affected by the inclusion of a Bill Gates in the audience. If they rely on advisors instead of impersonal sources, they're likely to be told what they want to hear instead of the truth.

For impersonal sources to offer meaningful criticism, the target of their commentary must be transparent -- i.e. only if they have access to the same general body of data as insiders can they offer informed observations. Whether in government or large corporations, secrets serve to arm insiders with knowledge hidden from general view. Insiders have a vested interest in preserving the shroud of secrecy, since this gives them power to control the debate. A leader surrounded by secrets can rely only on advice from people in on the secret -- a population with a viewpoint guaranteed to be warped by the sycophants it contains.

Effective leaders have figured out this dynamic; less effective leaders have not.

UPDATES: Fix punctuation; fix spelling.

Outcomes vs. Process

Some years ago, I worked at a couple of companies (EMC Controls, Digitrol/ITP Systems) that were in the process control and factory automation business. They have both since gone out of business, or been absorbed into other corporate entities. I bring this up as a way to segue into the topic of this post -- process vs. outcomes.

These companies were in the business of supplying process control to industrial customers. What we controlled was process, and by controlling the process, we affected the outcome. There is no such thing as 'outcome' control. That's not to say that there are not outcomes -- it's just to point out that in order to achieve some outcome, you choose the outcome as your goal, and then control the process used to achieve the outcome. The more effectively you control the process, the more likely you are to hit the desired outcome.... presuming, of course that the chosen process itself is capable of producing the desired outcome.

Choosing outcomes is relatively easy. Choosing effective process is much more difficult. Controlling a process (usually via measurement of some process metrics), once defined, is generally easier than choosing and defining the process.

Jeff Phillips wrote on a related topic back in July. To generalize the problem: how to choose an effective process so you are most likely to achieve the desired outcome?

In software design, one of the more useful concepts to come out in recent years has been design patterns. Can the idea of design patterns be generalized to help choose or design a process? Doing a "web search" (because Google doesn't want googling to become a verb), turns up a link or two. 

You get what you measure

You get what you measure.

This is an old and faithful management commandment that in my experience is sound advice. As in most things, the devil is in the details.

When I was at UPS  (developing software for their Package Systems division), they had an alphabet soup of different activities that they imposed upon management with the purpose of improving communication between manager and employee. One was called 'Talk-Listen-Act', or TLA. Management was required to schedule 'TLA' meetings with their direct reports. A manager's performance appraisal included measurement of the percentage of their TLA's that they had completed within the review period. Because their TLA 'effectiveness' was closely measured, all the managers within the unit where I worked dutifully scheduled and performed TLA's with their staff.

There may have been some value in having TLA's with some problem members of the staff, but for most, it represented a waste of time for both the manager and the staff member. The best thing that would come of it was perhaps a 'free' (i.e. expensed) lunch for both manager and staff member.

The TLA originated within UPS's operations divisions where the management is white collar and the 'staff' consists of blue collar truck drivers. In that environment, special steps had to be taken in order for management to have any one-on-one face time with their drivers, since the drivers were always out of the office, delivering or picking up packages. In that environment, having some more formal mechanism to encourage communication between management and their direct reports makes sense.

In the environment of software development, where management and staff interact face to face on a daily basis, having the formalism of a TLA was (is?) not a good use of time.... yet, because 'you get what you measure', a lot of cycles were burned to satisfy the metric that its measurement demanded.

In small companies, where the distance between the work you perform and the company's bottom line is short, it's easy to know what you should measure. In large companies, where employees are far removed from the company's bottom line, company management must invent the metrics against which performance can be measured. The choice of metrics is often driven by internal politics, the 'need' to build empires in order to climb the corporate ladder, and/or other motivations that serve their manager advocates more than they serve the business. Because the choices don't obviously flow to the bottom line, it's often difficult to evaluate the utility of the chosen metrics.

In politics, things are similar to the problems faced in large bureaucratic corporations. Instead of playing to the internal audience of corporate players, politicians play to a larger audience. For policy wonks, because their success is measured by the ability to advocate policies that will get adopted vs. the ability to advocate policies that actually work, we witness politicians advocating feel-good programs that have little chance of producing the desired outcome. Because we measure good intentions, good intentions are what we get. It's a wonder that anything works.

You get what you measure -- So it's hugely important (and often very difficult) to measure the right thing.