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How do you as an individual, “be different”?  As a company?  How do you create value that stands out from others providing your services?  And if your services fall in the same category as others, you must not be different, right?  Shouldn’t you then be in your own category?

Catching up on some blog reading, Brian Buck (@brianbuck) posted about a new book by Youngme Moon called  Different.

One clip in the video caught my attention:

However, simply being a smaller version of the bigger thing isn’t going to do it.  For me, “smaller” as a software company may in itself be different, but I need to do things that the big companies can’t do.  For me, I have always tried to focus on:

• Going to the “software gemba”: this is where it all started for me.  My own personal frustration with software companies and the applications themselves.  I got frustrated watching users fight with applications that should have improved organizational processes, but sometimes seemed to only hinder.  I still get the most value by talking with users directly and with observing how they use software to manage their information flow.  My “best ideas” are simply insights gained at the “gemba”.
• Action: Have an idea to enhance the product?  Something not working as expected?  Want a new feature?  I love ideas.  I strive to get ideas implemented quickly, something I think is significantly easier for a nimble organization than a large one.  Product changes are implemented in days instead of “in the next release sometime next year.”  I have even implemented something new while in an on-line support session with a client.  You won’t be routed to a call center overseas with LeanTech, you have direct access to someone understanding not only the product, but your individual business needs.

The “Different” video has gotten me thinking about other ways to differentiate.  I always want to find ways to give clients the best possible experience of working with a software vendor.  I’ve started cataloging some value-creating excellence here http://delicious.com/scottsorheim/excellence.

The video below is one of the items I bookmarked recently.  It shows an amazing way to stand out, in this case for a photographer, but it should definitely get the creative juices going for your own organization.

Casey Templeton Photography 2010 Promo from Casey Templeton on Vimeo.

Promotional video for “Different” is embedded below:

My friend Sam Duregger (@duregger) pointed me to an article about the obsessive-ness people have developed with their smartphones.

The article opens with a story about a man who was so engaged with his smartphone he didn’t notice the bathtub water he was filling for his daughter was overflowing onto the floor.  Why is this technology so engaging?  What is going on in peoples’ heads?  The article explains it with this:

It is because they are human, and human beings tend to repeat actions that are pleasurable and rewarding, particularly if they get our endorphins flowing. The complication is that we devalue delayed rewards — the feeling, for instance, of looking back on lovely moments with family — in favor of the immediacy of the new. In this case, it’s data. It makes us high.

Meeting short-term expectations of investors or the board is the smartphone of the business world.  The short term rewards feel good, and people want businesses to produce similar results time and again.  The reality is those short-sighted goals can lead to painful long-term results (and not always for the people setting those objectives, unfortunately).  This description at least gives me some perspective on why any business could possibly be short-sighted…this smartphone mentality simply transfers to their approach to business.

Hey, and for fun, the article even gives an example you can try out on your friends!

Get some friends together and tell them you will give them $100 now or $200 next year. Most of them, he said, will take the $100. Now tell them they can have $100 in 10 years or $200 in 11 years. Most will take the $200 because there is nothing immediate, or more exciting, fogging up their calculation about which is the greater reward.

Lean is for the long haul.  Lean focuses on building long-term value: for customers, for employees, for stake-holders.  You may not see the results in Q1 of implementation.  Endurance is needed.  But if you stick with it, the results will come and will be sustained long after the other guy’s bathtub is spilling onto the floor.

Today’s Alertbox on useit.com discusses how Agile software development is improving the focus on user experiences, and provides summary data showing the internal organizational satisfaction with the methodology.

Here’s the data:

What is this saying?  Responses are on a scale of 1-5, with 5 “indicating the highest level of integration or satisfaction”.  It is comparing the different methodologies a development team can use, and how satisfied the teams were with the methodologies.

It shows that teams were much more satisfied with how much the customer was considered through the “Integration of User Experience” metric.  It also shows the team satisfaction is much higher using Agile.  I’m not really sure the distinction between Agile and Iterative in their research, as their methodologies are largely similar, but it’s clear which principles “win out”.  Both internal and external customers benefit from the approach.

More about Agile

Agile software development has many similarities to lean, and is one of the primary elements of the Lean-Agile method that NetObjectives uses.  You can see the similarities to lean in the principles of Agile development:

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.
• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.
• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.
• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.
• Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity–the art of maximizing the amount of work not done–is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.

robust [roh-buhst]: strongly or stoutly built.

checklist [chek-list]: a list of items.

Struggling to create a process that produces a quality end product every time?

Something as simple as a checklist may be your starting point.  It apparently has worked for hotels.  If you’ve heard about Peter Pronovost, then you’ll know the value it has brought to healthcare.

What does a checklist accomplish?  It ensures that each step of a process has been followed.  In terms of the Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, the checklist lays out the initial Plan of what to Do, and depending upon the process, can also provide all of the necessary Check elements to ensure that the process is meeting the desired outcomes.

I was not a software developer by education.  So when I began developing Thrive, I had to establish a way to ensure that when I developed a new feature of Thrive that the end result was something that was created with a minimal amount of defects (bugs) and with a maximum amount of value to the end user.  Nobody wants to do something twice…I don’t even want to discover a bug, and the worst scenario is when defects reach the end user.  The checklist I created attempts to prevent defects from being created in the first place, but also tries to uncover them before they’re “out the door”.

From a software development standpoint, my checklist involves two core elements, with sub-lists under each main area.  Summarized, it looks like this:

1. Database Development: create data structures to support new feature, check impacts to existing data, create data necessary to support UI elements
2. User Experience: UI feature layout, interface logic and interface with data, user navigation, user security

This has worked incredibly well.  It has even worked when creating custom, “one-off” applications.  It ensures that everything is considered, even if it is not necessarily relevant to the current feature.  The checklist doesn’t cover every possible development scenario, but it probably covers 95% of them.  And when the outliers arise the checklist can get refined to ensure that the process remains solid.

While a checklist is not standard work, it can certainly be the starting point, whether in manufacturing, healthcare, government, or services.  It shouldn’t be difficult to get people together to determine a basic process checklist quickly.  From there, a more robust standard work can be developed.

Don’t think lean principles or standard work can be applied to the development of software or your IT department?  Alan Shalloway and Tom and Mary Poppendieck would beg to differ.

UPDATE

Found some new checklist resources on Harvard Business Review: What Sort of Checklist Should You Be Using? and an interview with Dr. Atul Gawande on Using Checklists to Prevent Failure.

Is Iowa the only state with a concerted, identified effort to improved quality, cost, and service, even having a “Lean Day Proclomation”?  Just read a post from Jamie Flinchbaugh on Mark Graban’s blog.  Jamie will be speaking at the Lean Government Exchange in June in Des Moines, IA.  Glad to see Iowa government continuing to be a leader in this arena.  I’m starting to develop a fire for what I can do to contribute to the application of lean in both government and healthcare, because I see huge opportunities to improve quality and cost in these arenas.  Glad to see my friends at PDG Consultants as a primary contributor to the event as well.

Some of the results of the lean efforts in Iowa Government can be found here.

Seems to me that “Depression 2.0” never happened, and probably isn’t likely to.

On the Forbes DigitalRules blog, Twenty Reasons for Optimism.

On the Value Acceleration blog, Mitch has noticed busy airports and cities.

And what’s fueling the turn around?  Innovative people like Jeremy Parker, who’s story is told on Mark Cuban’s blog.

I like Tom Peters’ synopsis:

Oracle and Methodist got me thinking about how much is working and moving in the U.S. economy, though you sure as hell wouldn’t know it from the press and its pundits—or the President’s schedule-of-gloom.

We are getting the tar beaten out of us, to be sure, but the "American narrative," circa 2009, does not begin and end on Wall Street and/or Detroit.

Pick up the ball and run with it, small businesses and entrepreneurs!  Yeah, I know Oracle and Houston’s Methodist Hospital aren’t exactly small businesses, but it seems that small businesses and startups fuel growth, and grow themselves.

Anyone else notice things picking up?  I know I’m plenty busy.

(side note: I’m calling this “a” Friday roundup as opposed to “the” Friday roundup, because it would only be “the” Friday roundup if I did it all the time.  But I’ve only done it one other time.)

Dan Roam of "The Back of the Napkin Blog" discusses a new book on his blog called Problem Solving 101 by Ken Watanabe.  The book was originally written in Japanese, but after great success in Japan there is now an English version selling in the US.  Here’s a brief snippet from the book’s web site:

Problem Solving 101 started out as a simple guide to teach Japanese schoolchildren critical thinking skills. But it quickly became an adult bestseller, thanks to the powerful effectiveness of Ken Watanabe’s problem solving methods.

I have not read the book yet, but the web site provides some sample videos on basic problem solving techniques which could be applied not only by the Japanese schoolchildren, but certainly any organization looking to improve/establish/teach methods to improve their operations.

All of this reminds me of one of my favorite Saturday Night Live segments from Weekend Update, which featured "financial expert" Oscar Rogers and his analysis on how to correct the economic crisis.  While his process is humorous given the enormity of the problem, there certainly is validity to his process.  Here’s what he had to say, followed by the clip from Hulu.  Enjoy!

"Take it one step at time.  Identify the problem.  FIX IT!  Identify another problem.  FIX IT!  Repeat as necessary until it’s all FIXED!" -Oscar Rogers

This post was inspired by my wife and "On being nimble versus visionary" over at the Learning About Lean blog.

Now is certainly a time in the business environment to be flexible.  To be adaptable.  To grab opportunity when others sit back and watch.  And the airport shuttle guy in the airport in Mexico was the ultimate example of this.  Here’s how the conversation went:

Me, looking for flight arrival information because we are waiting for passengers on another flight, approaching a man who is clearly affiliated with a shuttle service to take people to hotels:  "Where could we find flight information?"

Him, determining that my needs don’t directly match his services, but realizing there may be an opportunity for a different business opportunity to occur: "Where would you like to fly to?"

Wow.  In a span of about 2 seconds this man determined that although I wasn’t looking for his driving services I had created a market for him to provide other services and he immediately switched his business model to "I am now a travel agent"!  It would have been interesting to see if I had carried that conversation farther how he would have met that set of needs.

As referenced by the "On being nimble versus visionary" blog entry, a financial manager made this comment in an email:

"We stand resolved that the ability to react is now more important than the ability to predict."

The service provider in Mexico certainly realized this.  Without being able to predict what market needs might be walking off the airplane, he was ready to react and grab opportunity.

And this doesn’t have to be limited to small organizations (i.e. the Mexico shuttle service).  Zappos.com has numerous stories of delivery exceptional customer service outside of their "core" competency of providing shoes.  Here’s just one where people called customer service looking for the closest pizza delivery service!

Photo credit, Emery Way

About to go on a rant…a rant about marketing speak.  I guess this isn’t the first time I’ve done this.  I guess what is probably frustrating for me is that seemingly a lot of people swoon and end up in a trance at the horse and pony show a lot of companies produce.  "Yes, oh great company [read, marketing organization], I do need a real-time collaborative knowledge management portal…I’ve never used those phrase in my life until now, but I’m sure I need that."  You know what?  What people really need are easy-to-use tools that provide information that people can take action on and make improvements to their organizations.  Maybe I’m just too pragmatic in my approach.

Unfortunately, I think too many people pour money into things that don’t actually solve the problems that they have in the first place, or that will really deliver the business results that they need.  [Side bar: I guess I’m guilty sometimes, too…I almost made the plunge into a time-share that we could not realistically taken advantage of…but they key is: almost.]  Scott Whitlock has an example (if his blog hasn’t moved yet) about pouring good money after bad.

The VP at one of my clients tells a great story every time I bring other potential clients in to see there company.  "Give me the $2 million you were to spend on the ERP package you were going to buy, I’ll kick you in the shins because that’s how implementation would have felt, and then go buy Thrive instead."   (for obvious reasons I’m a little biased in why I like this quote).  While blunt, his point is of course that unfortunately many organizations do fall for the lure the dressed-up sales speak thrown around big systems.  Of course, we all know how Kevin Meyer feels about this as well.

I have a lot of feelings about ERPs, but here’s my current favorite visual about enterprise applications (from Go Big Always):

So what do people need?  Well let’s start with why in the world would you collect data to begin with?  People want to know where the problems are.  We need to know that something went wrong (or that things are going well).  We need feedback.  We need to know where the opportunities lie.  And then people want to be able to manage the process of improvement and see results later that they did indeed reach the desired target.

I guess if you do this through integrated and browser-based portal rationalization systems that non-intrusively collect data from disparate sources and provide real-time, resource multiplying, supply chain enhancing solutions, then more power to you.

"We’re cutting R & D."

"We have money right now, we’re just not spending any of it." (something I heard from a potential client of mine in the last few months)

A VP I was speaking to at a large manufacturer said a mistake their organization made in 2001 was to not invest capital in the future, and they’re still recovering from that.

A client of mine I spoke to last week said a company he used to work for cut back spending in R & D about 10 years ago and never recovered from decision.

Mark Perry says recovery is on its way:

But I hope that if people hear this news, that they’re not just waiting for it to happen.  Recovery requires action, which won’t happen in the form of a handout.  And there’s no better time to take action than during a down economy.

Get back to work.