Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Where’s Wally? Aka the Value?


If you are developing a new product or service creating value should be at the forefront of your mind, not an afterthought or lost in the noise. Constantly ask questions about what value you are creating and the beneficiary, and ring the alarm bells if value cannot be easily specified or articulated. 

There has been widespread coverage in the press over the past couple of years about large IT projects that have cost millions yet have failed to deliver anything. Many projects are written off, while c-level heads roll. The book of blame is passed from poor requirements, to poor systems, to poor platforms, to poor delivery methods, to poor vendors, to poor management, to poor strategy.
While all this is happening and procurement processes are tightening to avoid repeating costly mistakes I still see projects that make it off the ground, with funding and approval yet nowhere in the business case has value been specified. Or maybe value was in the beginning but as the project has evolved the team has lost sight of what value means and who will benefit from the value created. Another common problem is specifying value for the business but failing to address the value proposition for customers of the business. Having a digital or mobile strategy just because the competition has one will not win the hearts and minds of customers, nor will it win you any favours with the shareholders when you have to explain that you are writing off a £5-10m IT project spend because it failed to deliver any meaningful results. 

If you are developing a new product or new system continually ask ‘what is the value proposition?’ and ‘who will gain from it?’ As well as delivering value to the business, if any part of the system is customer facing then there must be some value delivered to the customer in order for the business to reap the rewards. ‘Value proposition’ can sound all a bit ‘consulting-speak’ but restated in simple terms just ask ‘what’s in it for me?’ with your business and/or customer hat on?’ This simple but effective check can be asked at a macro or strategic level and can equally if not more effective of all the subsequent strata of the project including the lowest level of detailed requirements. If you can’t articulate a true tangible, measurable value for a specific beneficiary at any/all levels of the project then it’s time to ring the alarms bells and stop what you are doing. To continue is to risk waste of time, effort and money. If you don’t know the answer, it is fine to proceed and base your efforts on assumptions, as long a) the assumptions are flagged as such and that you make pains to test those assumptions at the earliest opportunity; and b) that in your assumption you identify both the value proposition and the beneficiary.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Panic not over yet - one click from you can help Amnesty (no commitment or payment required)

Exciting news! Further to a previous post about the success of the Makeathon, some of my colleagues have continued the great work on the Panic Button app. Amnesty International has just been chosen as a finalist in Google's Global Impact Challenge for the work on a mobile alert system ("panic button"). The app enables human rights activists to trigger rapid response from their network in an emergency. Four out of ten projects will win £500,000. Public voting open now and until the 31st May. Please watch and vote at http://bit.ly/13KtuEl. Please vote and help share this widely with your colleagues, networks, friends and families!

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Notion of Girl...


So this is my first post in a year. I took some time out from my professional activities so that I could focus on the new addition to our family. But my brain is reawakening now and I’m starting out with a bit of an introspective question. ‘Who am I?’ Does it change who I am now that that I am a working mum?

The question was fuelled not just by the change in my personal circumstances and also my imminent return to working life but an article by Caroline Drucker (@Bougie) in Wired (Feb 2013), which argues that females in IT are not doing themselves any favours at all by referring to themselves as ‘girls’ -  while it makes you approachable 'does it say you're here to do business?' She continues to say 
that if females working "in the sausage party that we call the tech world" want to be taken seriously, that we need to take ourselves more seriously.

I have gone by the handle ‘guigrrrl’ for a long time. The pseudonym was born from fun days working on a fun contract with “aichtemelboy’ (@stusteel). He was the UI developer and I was the UI designer. No one else in the business knew anything about UI stuff from the product director to the lead programmer and so we built up a bit of kudos by making the application sing and dance in a way it hadn’t before or had been envisaged. The girl suffix to GUI (and the boy suffix to HTML) was all a bit tongue-in-cheek but had some reverence to cartoon super-heroes like AstroBoy. I love GUI, I know GUI, I’m passionate about GUI and I do GUI. It’s my professional superpower. It’s a blend of design, psychology and computers – three things that I have always loved.

So all this has led me to question the notion of what it means to be girl. I am a mum of two and have worked in this industry for 15 years so clearly I am not a ‘girl’ any more. But is it demeaning or damaging to my career to adopt the characteristics or playfulness of what it means to be a girl? To be a girl means to be female, yet free of stereotypes and expectations of what it means to be a woman. As soon as you stop being ‘girl’ and bcome ‘woman’ all sorts of other complications and expectations arise, not least of which include sex, physical, mental and professional ability, domesticity, behaviour, psychology etc. Drucker says that ‘girls are not threatening’ – so if I stop being a girl does that make me more threatening and is that a characteristic I want to be identified with? Not particularly – I want to be taken seriously, I want to be valued for my contribution and expertise, I want to be respected by my colleagues at all levels but do I have to stop being a ‘girl’ to achieve that?

Thoughts any alternative suggestions for a new non-girl handle appreciated :-0