Value Stream Partners

This is  a rant - mostly.

A couple of days ago I attended a seminar by MathWorks about their products.

MathWorks has its only Indian office in Bangalore. That is not surprising, the bulk of the government hi-tech establishments are located there.

But Delhi too is important, after all it is where the headquarters of those establishments are located:-) So here they have partnered with a local company. They are part of the MathWorks value stream.

The "bandobast" (organization) - venue, registration, refreshments, lunch, gifts- for the seminar was done by the value stream partner.

I was informed, by mail from MathWorks, about my registration and asked to bring a printed copy of the mail. At the registration counter that mail was no help. The guys there had a handful of sheets listing names and organizations. There was a stack of pre-printed name cards. What was the problem in putting them in boxes according to the some ordering scheme? Better still why not keep a couple of small printers and print out the names on the spot?.I have seen electoral rolls checking, which is done by low paid government school teachers and other district staff, done better.

What does it say about MathWorks when its value stream partner does not know enough to put the lists on an Excel sheet? Does it need great administrative talent to allot a unique registration number to each participant? Is it expensive, compared to the expense of the venue, and the refreshments and lunch, to put a couple of laptops and a couple of printers at the registration counter?

The piece-de-resistance was the gift in exchange for the filled feedback sheet. It is good looking table clock. Nice big digits. The instruction sheet needs a magnifying glass. The day of the week cannot be set. Maybe some Chinese company designed it using a MathWorks product:-) Maybe all the clocks were not like that. Maybe, they fixed this one clock specifically for the guy who was making all that ruckus at the registration desk :D

Lesson: If your value stream partner interfaces with the customer, it is vital that you check the customer experience. Dog-fooding is more than eating the lunch served at the venue.

A Role Model for Entrepreneurs

This video on what it takes to build a successful venture was recommended by my friend Karnan.

Learn about dog-fooding, about values and vision.

Clients or Customers?

I have always been averse to the use of the term "clients" in the IT business.

The Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th edn.) gives the first meaning as "a person using the services of a professional person or organization". It gives the meaning of the term in Middle English as "a person under the protection and patronage of another".

Lawyers have clients. Chartered accountants have clients. Bosses of political parties (other than left wingones) have clients.It is a relationship of power to harm. And of course doctors & psychiatrists have the greatest power. They have patients. And gurus have chelas.

Lawyers, CAs, political bosses, doctors & psychiatrists do not entertain clients. Clients are expected to entertain them!

Do lawyers, CAs,  doctors, psychiatrists compete with other lawyers, CAs, doctors and psychiatrists in the manner say Wipro competes with Infosys? Do they have sales guys? Do they make presentations to their clients?

They do not charge a price. They charge fees. (Gurus have guru dakshina.) Do they negotiate with clients? Do their clients question them about their cost structure?

What we have are not clients (usually pronounced as Kly-ints). We have customers. See this quote from the Mahatma on Zoho's site. Incidentally, I saw this quote, a few decades ago, on a poster in the Khadi Bhandar shop on Connaught Circus. The shop assistants paid it no heed.

Peter Drucker said, "The purpose of a business is to create a customer". Can a doctor say the purpose of his practice is to create a sick person? Or a lawyer say that the purpose of his practice is to get more people to file litigations?

We have customers. Customers have the power.

Dogfooding - Getting the Customer Experience

I wanted an additional TataSky connection. I logged on to my account to buy one. There is no apparent way in which I could do this on-line. I went to the contact us page which has two levels of selections. You have to select the first level then see if the relevant choice is available at the second level. I was lucky enough to have found the relevant choice on the 2nd first level choice. Is it very customer friendly? What if my subject did not match any of the sub-categories?

Why not just give an email-id - contact-at-somecompany.com? Are the sales/customer-care people so busy that they cannot figure out what to do unless it is bureaucratically fitted into some category?

Do C level executives see such mail?

More importantly, how many executives actually visit their sites as a customer, or ask their friends and relatives to do so?

American managers have a saying, "If you make dog food, you must eat it". That is getting the customer experience. Do not count on the dog filling out a feedback form:-)

I know we did not dogfood the programming tools we made :-(