Business Quests in the Information Age

Thalys experiments: WiFi inside, idiot design?

Writing while in the train getting back to Brussels after a couple of days in Paris for Ad:Tech. Yes while in the train. That is really cool. What's less cool is the amount of over-engineering Thalys seems to have put in designing this service: resources like Gmail, Google documents, Network solutions webmail and Google Apps are simply not usable because some stupid piece of junkware that runs on the Thalys WiFi network considers those to be forbidden resources. Even the sites of Le Monde and CNN are not accessible. So what gives? Is Thalys developing a new concept of a hyperlocal web? Are they trying to revolutionize the web by severly limiting connectivity? Is this a censorship experiment for the Chinese government?
None of these exciting avenues I'm afraid. It only seems that somebody felt it important to implement an extremely stringent security policy, which, in the end, voids of most of its value the great promise of WiFi aboard high-speed trains. I'm sure they'll fix this someday, but what does it say about cost of opportunity in terms of revenue to the company? What untellable stories of wasted service design resources does this case convey? Is there anyone to doubt that product / service design will be a strategic competency for companies in the coming years?

In the end, it all boils down to common sense and a structured albeit flexible approach to product ownership. Something that does seem to be a common thread to methods like scrum, agile development, permanent beta, Toyota's continuous improvement through the kaizen approach or NLP... They all accept a degree of chaos that characterizes the real world. Realism, common sense, perseverance, patience, continuous and relentless improvement, continuous quest for evolution, no nonsense and a thirst for  feedback are some of the characteristics of approaches that work.

Now on the positive side of things the idiot design does not prevent Thalys travelers from accessing Wikipedia, Barack Obama's web site or the Business Quests blog :-) as you will see in the screen-shots.

Kick starting product management with scrum

The recent training on scrum has been an interesting inspiration for me. Even more importantly, it opened up new perspectives on the best way to carry out product management work and provided a framework that helps me understand a bit better things that went particularly well in past projects and by contrast why other projects were such drags.

Thinking about the pains of getting customers to feel happy with a product, I realized that product management is one of the most critical areas that is broken in many companies. In fact in many cases it's stalled and needs kick starting. So, I structured a workshop using scrum artifacts to run it in combination with other tools and disciplines. The purpose is to have participants exposed to scrum artifacts while working to get product management moving again so as to create a positive exposure and to generate motivation to use scrum once product development is reorganized to be agile. In the workshop there is a short introduction to scrum focusing mainly on the way scrum works rather than on the origins and history of it and to run that section of the workshop the excellent introduction slides by Black Marble will be used.

The structure of the workshop is in the following slides. Feel free to use this stuff: it's under BY-SA-NC Creative Commons license... In fact, I will likely run such a workshop pretty soon in one of my projects, but given the nature of the exercise I won't disclose anything about it and it will be yet another situation about which blogging is not an option... Anyway, I hope this will be useful to you and as ever I am really eager to get some feedback about this stuff, especially if there are "stories from the field" :-)

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Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Upgrading my "software"

One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...

Full speed ahead for Linked In

Linked In is evolving big time with the integration of social networking functionality of a new sort and with the extension of its services to cover company profiles, something I consider awesome. A few months back I wrote a piece stating why I did not believe in Facebook for business and how a combination between carefully chosen Facebook-like functionality and Linked In functionality would deliver major value. Now more than ever, Linked In is becoming a real custodian of professional identity, pretty much like Google will increasingly be the authority to ascertain the identity of individuals (in fact they already act as a trusted third party for customer details verification in e-commerce transactions).
Anyway, here's a nice little video of the product manager doing a demo of the new feature, which will help propel Linked In to a position its look-alike competitors will have hard time catching up with. And by the way, this is the sort of stuff I would love to see more product managers do for their products.

Understanding business growth to manage more of it

To many people the very idea that growth can be a problem for a business may sound strange. Yet, growth is the cause of demise of many new ventures and proper management of business growth is one of the most critical tasks for managers to perform. I put together some slides to outline some very important aspects of growth sustainability mainly from the financial perspective. Hopefully it will give entrepreneurs some food for thought. Enjoy and please let me have your feedback.

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How to run a (re)branding workshop

In recent work sessions and discussions with customers and prospective business partners I was asked to provide some input regarding a process that could support a (re)branding exercise. While I have by no means developed anything to generate relevant brands or names for products or services, I have been asked to run workshops aimed at helping teams agree on the (re)branding of one of their products or services. These sessions were structured using several tools coming straight out of NLP as well as methods developed by Dr De Bono and a fantastic design company called IDEO. So I decided to make the process available under Creative Commons license for anyone who may need to use it. Feedback is very welcome as I look forward to the opportunity of improving the way the workshop is structured and the adequacy of the issues tackled. Please note that these slides are "facilitator's training or prep" rather than stuff that can be shown to the participants of the workshop.

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Great User Generated Content in the US Primaries

Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.

Matthieu Ricard at Google

Interesting insights with a strong scientific and philosophical basis. Also interesting is the fact that Ricard was invited to speak at Google. What would happen in the economy if we had truly happy people at work? What would the impact be on our societies and on global issues facing mankind?

Confidence can be a double edged sword

In my projects I often work with entrepreneurs who seem to consider it vital to show absolute confidence in their business idea. They should listen to this testimony.