Hurry up and Outsource

The program director handed me a thick document. "Could you guys look at this contract and give us a thumbs-up?"

"What's it for?"

"We're going with another service desk vendor. We need to sign this contract Friday."

It was Tuesday afternoon. "All my people are busy on other projects. Why the rush now?"

"We need it by Friday to make the deadline." (Whose?) "Just look at the technical stuff."

"We'll do what we can."

Wednesday, after some Quality Coffee and Fireside Time with his 120-plus pages, I returned it to the still-anxious director.

Bear bad news first. "Won't work. Don't sign Friday."

"What? Why? We've been working this out for more than two months."

"Look, sorry." In addition to several glaring contractual oversights (fodder for another post), the contract omitted a critical data requirement. The vendor's system had no way to know who was calling the help desk. Responsibility for the data exchange had been left out.

We went over the other details together. Not a good day, but not terrible. At least we caught it.


The Real Problem

Getting lost in requirement and design details almost always works to an outsourcing vendor's advantage. Design elements not explicitly spelled out in the contract become change orders.

Even at an agreed-to rate change orders cost a premium. They stretch out the contract because the customer has already bought in and fears losing the investment. They're the icing on the cake.

Software or system change orders are best. Now the vendor has an reason to start an engineering development project. New rounds of consultation with the system specialists, software engineers, architects, programming teams, project managers, and others begin, all billable. Even better is a change order so big the vendor brings in third-parties to fulfill the request and passes through their costs plus the vendors overhead. It's a rent.

Change orders also drive the in-house staff crazy. Wasn't the vendor supposed to take care of this problem? Why are we doing our work and their work too? Wasn't this supposed to save money?

Meanwhile, if the project is in implementation phase, good reason exists to miss the start-up deadline and press for the "on-time delivery" performance bonus. After all, the customer ordered the change; it isn't the vendor's glitch that made the project late.

The process design must be as complete as possible before contracting. It's especially hard when outsourcing services because the service boundaries may be loosely defined. The services drive the data and reporting requirements. Get these right before thinking about the details of, say, file transfer mechanisms.


Fixing the Design

Separate the contract into at least two pieces: legal boiler plate, and specifications, requirements, and design components. The boilerplate should reference the other document(s) as part of the binding contract.

Put the business and technical people to work on the design specs and the legal people to work on the boilerplate. Even if the final contract must be a single, unified document, the right folks will be looking at the right pieces instead of getting distracted by irrelevant work.

Go over the processes and hand-offs to find what information goes to whom, and who calls when. If it's within the team's skill set, I strongly recommend making a high-level UML Sequence Diagram to show these hand-offs. Flow charts can quickly become confusing and they obscure responsibilities.

Be sure the contract indicates who "owns" what pieces, of course. But also specify acceptance criteria on both sides, if possible.


The service desk project delayed three weeks until a new contract with the necessary changes went through.


References

• UML 2 Sequence Diagram

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Problems On and Off

Some time ago my sister called with an urgent question. "The battery on my new iPod keeps running out. I have to leave it plugged in all the time."

"So turn it off when you're not using it."

"I don't know how to do that. There's no OFF button."

"Ah."

I hadn't an iPod, but I did have an iPod Shuffle. The Shuffle had a simple slider switch with three positions: off, on, and shuffle. On played recordings sequentially, shuffle arbitrarily. The volume control on the earpiece cable had clear labels: + (louder) and - (quieter). Anyone could understand the device's operation after experimenting less than 5 minutes.

I had no clue how to turn off her iPod.

I asked my son who also had an iPod Classic. "Oh yeah, hold down the play button until it turns off."

What?

Keeping in theme, let me offer that my sister is not broken.  She's a Ph.D. psychologist (Fuller Seminary), holds a license to practice in California, and, at the time of her query, ministered to the mentally ill in California's maximum security prisons. She had purchased the unit to listen to recordings needed to fulfill her continuing education requirement. She could not turn off the unit because it has no OFF button.

The Real Problem

As do many devices, the iPod Classic switches on whenever the user presses any control button. It switches off only when the user presses and holds a specific button. Its design violates the natural mapping of a symmetric operation, ON/OFF.

Consider most houses' lighting switches. Switch placement is usually handy to a room's entrance. ON/OFF is simple and clear: a single movement and its reverse control the light. The action is symmetric and compact.


Now imagine a room in which any action — turning the door handle, touching a wall panel, opening a door, clapping — turns on the lights, but to turn them off residents must find, touch, and hold a small panel labelled light. What would happen?

That's right: the lights in the room would burn forever. Lamps and other devices, just like my sister's iPod, would remain on, constantly chewing power. No one would bother to turn them off because it was too much trouble to find the light switch.

There is no energy crisis. There is an OFF button crisis.

Today it's so easy to turn stuff on, so easy in fact that now many things turn themselves on. What people cannot figure out is how to turn stuff off. People have given up in frustration. They no longer care that stuff is still on and they just leave the room.

Fixing the Design

ON/OFF is a critical function. When something goes wrong, it's the "kill" switch, the switch of last resort. For example, automotive "unintended acceleration" incidents would halt (or happen less often) if drivers had the presence of mind to switch the ignition off. The engine would die and any mis-application of the throttle pedal would cease to speed the car. OFF saves lives.

Good ON/OFF control design must

• make the control distinct (keep it apart from other functions);
• make the control compact (locate it in a one spot);
• ensure the control is prominent (put it where it's easy to find); and,
• be clearly labelled (unmistakably identify it).

Will these rules ruin "smooth" industrial design? Perhaps. But the customers will be able to turn off their machines and the world will be a quieter place.

References

• iPod Classic User Guide

Special note: Happy Pi day!

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Deliciously Simple

I love In-N-Out Burger.

I'm in good company. Top chef Gordon Ramsay loves In-N-Out too.

The food is delicious. It's hot, freshly made from fresh ingredients (onion, lettuce, tomato, unfrozen meat, whole potatoes), made to order, inexpensive, and fast. What else is there to love?

Its design. Its design is genius.

First, the name of the restaurant tells you absolutely everything you need to know about it: they serve hamburger sandwiches and service is fast. If you wanted a crispy fried chicken caesar salad, you came to the wrong place, buckeroo. Why on earth did you walk in here?

Second, the In-N-Out menu reflects the brand's elegant simplicity. In-N-Out serves burgers, fries, and drinks. Period. If a customer cannot figure out this menu, they're really, really in the wrong place. That, or unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet and Arabic numerals.

Third, the restaurants are the same. In-N-Out has, from what I have seen in my wanderings, three store styles: small (now no longer being built), average, and a large version at travel centers along highway locations. The company knows everything about its stores, from how many staffers needed per shift down to the number of palm-tree logo tiles needed to build the dining room.

Last, and most importantly, In-N-Out has a "hidden" menu. You can get a burger built any way you want. If In-N-Out has the ingredients and can figure out how to charge for it, they do it. If you are super hungry, order a "four by four". Low-carbing it? Order "protein style". Your vegetarian friends can order a "grilled cheese". For a special treat, order "fries well done, animal style". You'll need two people to eat it.

In-N-Out is the Unix of fast food joints.


The Real Problem

Needless choice is the enemy of fast food. Or fast anything.

Walk into a McDonald's, Burger King, KFC, Jack-in-the-Box, Taco Bell, or Sonic restaurant. I almost guarantee you'll peruse the menu for three minutes before you capitulate to the confusion and order the #1 SuperValueGulp combo. If you are someone's kid, Dad, Mom, or Coach orders you a McJacko King Meal #1 with a Little Ice Ogre Princess movie toy to shut you up.

Yes the goody-goody Diet Police have forced major chains to fluff their menus with "healthy choices" the public refuses to buy (it's fast food not health food). But the choice overload is not entirely accidental. The high margin items are fries and soft drinks, the loss leaders are meat and fresh items. And the soft drinks are self-serve, further lowering labor costs. You can select a nutritious, low-calorie meal from the Dollar-O-Rama menu but you cannot assemble it mentally, so you pick #1. Partially, this is why you're fat.

Proof? In-N-Out has three combo meals: my local McDonald's, eight (or is it ten?). Anything more than seven overloads short-term memory, and you'll likely go with the one in the top left-hand corner. #1. And who doesn't want to be #1?


Fixing the Design

There are two design lessons here.

The first is honest and direct. Make it simple. Make the choices distinct, easy to find, and valuably differentiable. Do you want the one year subscription for $80 or the two year subscription for $120, a $40 savings?

You can always generate value by cross-selling, upselling, or customizing. Keep the customer (or user) happy by telling him the choices clearly and making the results apparent. A happy customer/user is a retained customer/user, a confident customer/user. Happy people lower customer acquisition, training, and time-on-task costs. Build it into the business, workflow, or process model.

Customers value knowing that what they purchased came fairly priced. Clarity seems fair; the vendor isn't hiding anything. Saturn Motors started this way very successfully.

The second lesson is that the dazed and confused buyer will usually default to something (eventually, if hungry enough). If that something has lots of calming whitespace around it so it stands out from the noise, that's what s/he will purchase. The sales cycle will be longer, however, as the buyer's mental mouse traverses the maze of options before reaching the cheese.

Or the mouse could abandon its quest and walk next door to get a Double-Double cheeseburger at In-N-Out.


References

• The In-N-Out Secret Menu
• Gordon Ramsay on In-N-Out
• Food Choices Evolve Through Information Overload
• Choice Proliferation, Simplicity Seeking, and Asset Allocation
• Freedom of Choice

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