garygilliland:

Avinash Kaushik from Marketing Profs Daily Fix has pointed out a rule that younger professionals would do well to remember. Although the article talks about it in the context of websites, it’s pretty much universal for all types of projects and ideas.

“HiPPO’s rule the world when it comes to creating customer experiences. And that’s a bad thing. No matter what you think the optimal customer experience should be on the website it is quite likely that you walk into a meeting room, or office, and regardless of your competence the HiPPO decides what goes on the site. “

HiPPO stands for: the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion.

Most young professionals live under the mistaken belief that their opinion matters and their good ideas will be taken on merit. Sadly this, generally, isn’t the case. Time and bitter experience will teach you, if the idea doesn’t gel with the thoughts of the HiPPO then it probably won’t happen. There doesn’t need to be a good logical, business or operational reason. It’s just human nature. They’re having a bad day, don’t want to be undermined by a junior, they’re pursuing their own agenda, etc.

The most successful solution to this that I’ve done and had done to me is the ‘uniced cake’. Take the idea to the HiPPO, present 99% of it and explain you have difficulties in making it a winning solution. Unless they are genuinely opposed to the idea in any form then the general reaction is that they add the icing and push the idea through whilst taking some or all of the credit. You’ve validated their position as the expert, the idea has been approved and hopefully you’ve scored a few points in the HiPPO’s good book.

I know it disheartening to discover that the authority figures in your organisation are sometimes no better than petulant children but the sooner you grasp that simple fact the sooner you can start to make a difference.

From Experiment or Go Home

Thanks to El for pointing me to this article.

At the Mac World conference filmmaking students asked Kevin Smith how succeed in film making. His answer pretty much covered how to succeed in any creative endeavour.

“I’d make one.

Make one that everybody likes.

What do you think happened? Think I was standing over a virgin holding a necronomicon?

The trick is to make something everybody digs.”

It’s just after Christmas and like a lot of people I’ve spent my fair share of time in toy shops and I’ve been reminded of a goal that I had when I ran a programming team. Everything should be designed like a Tomy toy. I don’t mean child-like but where possible solutions should follow the pattern in toys.

I’ve got a memory like a sieve so I like acronyms hence SERIES

• S imple – nothing wasted
• E ngaging – asks to be used
• R obust – hard to break
• I nteractive – instant feedback
• E lective – you choose how to use it
• S timulating – encourages creativity

Compare this with Word, Photoshop and even web apps like Gmail. How many menus, icons and hidden rules are there to cope with before you can use the things?

In my last post I listed some bit ’n’ pieces from The Art of Looking Sideways but I thought this one was important so I’ve lifted it out separately. In the book Fletcher points out some attributes of creativity.

• challenging assumptions
• being receptive to new ideas
• recognising similarities or differences
• making unlikely connections
• taking risks
• building on ideas to make better ideas
• looking at things in new ways
• taking advantage of the unexpected
• taking chances

As a checklist for developing your creativity pretty much covers all the bases.

I was in the post office today and saw a poster proudly proclaim "4 out of 10 of customers are using the wrong service. Ask a member of staff for help."

A 40% error rate is not a problem with customers. Either staff have allowed customers to use the wrong service and / or the services on offer are too complicated for the target customer.

In either case why would you point the finger at the customer and say they are using the wrong service? Surely a positive approach to the situation would yield a better response. "We’ve made our service simpler", "We can save you money", "We’ve improved our service". Anything but declaring 40% of our customers are wrong.

The same is true of any situation where you’ve identified a problem.

• Never accuse the customer.
• Be honest but try to position the solution as a positive.
• Always remember it doesn’t matter how elegant you think a product / service / solution is, if it doesn’t work for the customer it doesn’t work.

Multi-award winning graphic designer Michael Bierut claims he is not creative but more like a doctor who helps sick patients. In this video he distils the knowledge from his career into 5 maxims that are useful not only for designers but for anyone who is starting out on a project.

1. Listen first, then design
2. Don’t avoid the obvious
3. The problem contains the solution
4. Indulge your obsessions
5. Love is the answer

Michael Bierut: 5 Secrets from 86 Notebooks from 99% on Vimeo.

Imagine, your waiting for a meeting. You’re told the person your meeting will be delayed by 15 minutes. Ten minutes later your told to wait another 15 minutes. Then your asked to wait another 15 minutes and so on until you’ve wasted hours.

The project management equivalent is what I call the death by a thousands cuts. That is someone constantly tweaking their budget and timeline upwards. They never ask for anything big. Just another 10%, an extra week, one more person to solve the problem, until the project becomes unrecognisable.

Constant tweaking is caused by one of two things:-

• They are unwilling to present changes as single batch because they’re afraid they will look incompetent.
• They were unable to present changes as a single batch because they are incompetent.

When a project manager does this they damage their reputation,  they hurt other projects in a programme and they strain finance and resources throughout the organisation.

A project manager has to have the ability and courage to prepare and present a plan which encompasses all of the changes within their control. Don’t make people suffer through the death by a thousand cuts, tell them it’s going to cost an arm and leg. You won’t receive a medal but at least you can come out with a reputation for being realistic and honest.

Stuff happens, that’s a fact of life for a project manager. How you react to that stuff is what separates the good from the bad.

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”

- Bertrand Russell

“You think your users want to use your software. They do not want to use your software. They want to ‘have used’ your software.”

David Platt

If only more developers would learn that this the truth.

Most software is not an experience to be enjoyed but a tool to be used. Make the tool, simple and efficient so that the job can be completed quickly and painlessly.

Experiments by the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen have shown that people who are lost actually do walk in circles. Jan Souman explains that

“People cannot walk in a straight line if they do not have absolute references, such as a tower or a mountain in the distance, or the Sun or Moon, and often end up walking in circles.”

This seems likes a reasonable metaphor for a project that doesn’t start out with clear goals which the team can work towards.