Direct responsibility means an individual, or a team, is responsible for everything necessary to turn a customer need into results for the customer. Results should have a measurable impact on the customer. An impact that those that are responsible should be a part of measuring and understanding, such that they seek to achieve the impact. Direct responsibility avoids splitting up…
Category: Customer Success
Passing the torch
There’s no better way to be successful than to hold yourself accountable to the results you’re a part of creating. And not to intermediate results, but the actual end product or service you provide to your customers. In fact, success often entails being responsible for your customer’s success as well as your own. Many organizations struggle to be successful simply…
The after, after action review
Defining when work is done is not always cut and dry. The definition of done is murky in many situations because responsibilities are often slice and diced among many individuals that work in succession to do their part and hand it off to someone else, much like factory work to assemble a car. Each person sees done as the point…
Contemplating effectiveness
Efficiency is the easy route in business. It’s simple to discuss. It feels natural to talk about. It aligns with the fact that we usually pay people for their time, not their results. It seems logical that improving business would be about being more efficient. But efficiency only reduces the cost. It doesn’t increase the net value, in fact, it…
What’s keeping your customers from picking up the phone?
Have you ever got off the phone with a customer and thought to yourself, why didn’t they call sooner? Or, why don’t they let me know when such and such happens? If you’ve had these or similar thoughts, it may be natural to want to blame the customer in your mind and think they must be disorganized or don’t have…
Customer request is not customer value
Just because a customer asks for something, does not mean that what they ask for is actually valuable to them. And even if it’s valuable, it’s another thing to be worthwhile. To be worth more than it costs. When a customer makes a request, they’re starting a conversation. The first part of that conversation needs to be about why and…
Prioritize based on customer value too
Very few organizations involved in software development, and in many other industries, get to the point where they prioritize the work they do based on the value it will create. Most work is prioritized based on one person’s opinion about what should be done next. It might be something they perceive as important, something that will solve a problem they’re…
The spectrum of expertise
When you treat learning as an investment, you want to minimize unnecessary efforts. With the advent of the internet, learning seemingly became a free endeavor. You can learn just about anything online. And this is a great opportunity. However, it doesn’t come without a cost, albeit non monetary. You have to have an eye for what is and isn’t applicable.…
Tactical institutional learning
Once you come to the realization that learning holds the potential for dramatic organizational improvement and that it should be a part of what people do with the first 40 hours of their week, you might wonder how to get the most out of it. First, let’s differentiate spontaneous learning from intentional learning. Every day you have to look things…
Aligning interests
My childhood home has two bathrooms upstairs, one in the hallway for everyone. And one in the master bedroom. They shared common water lines. If Mom was taking a shower in the master bedroom and I didn’t hear the water running, I’d hear about it when I flushed the toilet in the hallway bathroom. We shared a common interest, needing…