Don’t assume the experts know everything they need to know

Roger on 08/04/2018

Bring in the expert

I’ve been involved in a few projects where an expert in a particular field was tasked with working on an aspect of the project. It was assumed that as they were experts that they should be able to figure what is required and come up with the best solution. Invariably they don’t. Being experts doesn’t make them mind readers.

Tabla Rasa doesn’t work.

There is no such thing as a blank slate. Briefing is important. Providing background and contextual information helps the expert to see where their contributions fit in, working in isolation with the barest of facts may seem like it helps the expert focus but it makes the work harder and means the results won’t be what was expected.

Self-organising shouldn’t mean isolated

With Agile adoption came the idea of self-organising teams that could be given a piece of a project and then left to figure out the best way to deliver that piece. The downside of taking this approach too far is that the teams of experts aren’t involved enough with the other aspects of the project, they work in isolation, and produce out-of-context and sometimes unusable results.

Weeknotes #87

Roger on 06/04/2018

What happened this week…

  • Set up Microsoft Planner for Ecommerce Projects.
  • Wrote Stock Adjustments logic tests.
  • Reviewed advertising campaigns.
  • Started an Amazon Advertising campaign for Fascinators.
  • Worked on the brief for UX designs for the new Online Shop.
  • Gathered Range Plans to begin planning for adding more products to the Online Shop.
  • Reviewed the proposed interfaces between AX and Magento.
  • Discussed plans for Everyday cards and Christmas cards on the Online Shop.
  • Analysed Ecommerce business performance over the last finance year.
  • Planned department targets for this financial year.
  • New Hoodies and Jogging Bottoms stock arrived.
  • Discussed future plans for the Online Shop at the Quarterly Online Shop Product meeting.
  • Discussed how to fix the email forwarding issue in Freshdesk.

Read this week…

Doing next week…

  • Discussing the new Supporter products range.
  • Working on more detailed requirements for Magento 2.
  • Discussing plans for Pin Badges over the next year.
  • Completing data journey mapping for defibrillator customers.
  • Meeting the new UX Designer and discussing the new Online Shop.
  • Discussing the proposition and marketing for fefibrillators.
  • Discussing clothing rebuys.

Interesting stat of the week…

  • Last year we sold 646 different products, and the top ten best selling products provided 43% of our income.

In the not too distant future….

  • A much broader range of products on the Online Shop.

The removal of digital

Roger on 04/04/2018

I read Robert Green’s blog post about digital getting out of the way for fundraising and not using the term ‘digital’ in team names.

It reminded me something an old manager of mine said, “One day, having a social media team will be thought of in the same way as having a telephone team”. He meant that everyone has a telephone on their desk and knows how to use it, and that social media and using it to talk to customers would be something everyone in a business does, it wouldn’t be owned exclusively by a single team.

Whilst I’m not sure social media teams would agree as arguably social media platforms have gotten more complex since then, the point is easily transferable to ‘digital’.

Digital is a mindset and a skillset that everyone who works in a twenty first century business should possess. Organisations may take the same approach as CRUK and choose not to have a separate digital team, such as Halfords which split it’s digital team and joined them with the IT and Marketing departments. Or organisations may use a hub and spoke model with a core digital team doing customer-facing digital activities such as website development and performance marketing, but with the intention to push out digital skills into other parts of the organisation. Or an organisation could choose to have a single central digital team who manage all the digital activities for the organisation.

And perhaps, as Robert suggests, you can measure an organisations digital maturity by the model it uses. A really digitally mature organisation just does ‘digital’ without even thinking about it as separate from doing ‘reporting’ or doing ‘writing’ or doing ‘customer service’. I remember a few years ago, CRUK’s head of digital as he was then, saying that he wanted the people at CRUK to be as digital at work as they are at home. No one sits and home, switches off the TV, and thinks, “I’m now going to be ‘digital'”, as they put Netflix on, they just do it. Maybe removing ‘digital’ from team and role names is big part of being as digital at work as at home.

Bug fixes in everyday life

Roger on 01/04/2018

Things go wrong all the time. As part of my thinking around dealing with failure in a constructive and restorative way I’ve been thinking about ways of monitoring the performance of a system and how if something goes wrong, the failure is recorded and prioritised by the impact it has on normal functioning.

Some definitions

When I say system, I don’t mean software, I mean whatever complex social, intellectual, technical, political, emotional system we exist as individuals and as teams. I’m talking about business a bit, but mostly I’m talking about life.

When I talk about failures I’m talking about bugs as something that occurs that prevents the system from proceeding as expected. There are three parts to that; ‘occurs’ means the bug has to be something new that happens, not an existing on-going problem. ‘Prevent from proceeding’ means the bug causes a change of direction from the course that life/the system was following. And ‘as expected’ means that the course doesn’t need to have been a documented plan, there just needs to be an expectation about how things should be.

A personal experiment

So, to see what I can learn about failure I’m going to write a bug report for everything that goes wrong for me in a week. I’ll include:

  • What went wrong.
  • What impact did it have.
  • What did I do to deal with the failure.
  • What could I do to prevent it occurring again.

After a week of consciously considering how these everyday bugs occur and what impact they have, I will hopefully learn something useful about dealing with failure.

Flock of seagulls on Hayling Island beach

Roger on 01/04/2018