Time for a Change: ClearBrick.com

We've done it again. This week we redesigned and relaunched our website at ClearBrick.com. We did this to improve our focus on customer experience and make it easier to get the solutions, research, or broadcasts that you need. We encourage you to take a look at our latest creation and let us know what you think.


In our latest edition of ClearBrick.com, you'll notice a number of significant changes:

• More clear and straightforward navigation. We've redesigned our navigation to help you get to what you need in fewer steps.
• New individual product pages for each product or solution. We've introduced a new series of pages that provide more detailed information for each product or solution that we produce.
  
• Graphical redesign. We revamped the entire look and feel of the site to highlight the information that's most important to you.
  

Take a look around and let us know what you think. I think you'll really like our latest edition. As always, you can drop me a line through the Contact Us page of ClearBrick.com

Regards,

Robert Howard
Founder & Chief Executive
ClearBrick LLC

Inside Jobs, October 28, 2008

Inside Jobs, October 20, 2008

Improve Maturity with Capabilities

When projects need a strong dose of strategy & direction, leaning solely on requirements just won’t cut it anymore.

If you’ve been a part of any business project during your professional career, you’ve seen the basic formula before: Project teams analyze the current state, identify requirements, and then implement a solution that best meets the requirements. Once the solution is implemented, management turns its attention elsewhere – never to think about that specific area of the business again. This ‘check the box’ thinking can be risky business in an environment where new competitive threats can appear anywhere and anytime.

In today’s fast-paced business environment, businesses need a performance framework that can grow over time, be benchmarked against the competition, and stretch the imagination of employees and stakeholders. Although requirements development will always be a mainstay for any project management discipline, the incorporation of capabilities and maturity models can better position your business for future competition and unforeseen threats and opportunities.

Business requirements will always be a critical element in any project development lifecycle. But they can only take you so far. Requirements – to be effective – must be relatively static and defined to the lowest level possible. When the business solution is ultimately implemented, the determination whether it met the individual requirements is answered with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with little room for interpretation or improvement.

When project teams are attempting to identify requirements, whether they realize it or not, they are typically simply restating how business currently gets done. New and forward thinking requirements are difficult to identify without some external influence, benchmark, or reference point. This is hardly an effective approach for identifying provocative strategies that will position the business to win in the long term.

Leading businesses and project managers are discovering a new approach to developing – and maintaining – provocative business strategies and solutions that can grow and change over time. They utilize a capability maturity framework that serves as a blueprint and yardstick for continuous improvement. Perhaps one of the best-known and well-established capability maturity models is the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model, which is often referred to as the SEI-CMM or SE-CMM.

The Software Engineering Capability Maturity Model serves the Information Technology function and outlines in clear and specific terms how the software development ‘capability’ can grow and mature over time. The SE-CMM defines maturity for the capability in five distinct levels – with level 5 being the highest or most mature capability.

The capability maturity model provides three important benefits:

1. Capability Maturity Models establish a tangible yardstick for a specific business capability (such as software development) that businesses can measure themselves against. By doing so, businesses can more honestly and accurately identify their current level of abilities.
2. Maturity models identify a specific best practice level for the capability that businesses can strive to achieve. By establishing a tangible continuum, the capability maturity model allows businesses to more clearly gauge the gap between their current and desired capability levels.
3. For standard capability definitions that are widely adopted across businesses and industries, businesses can benchmark themselves against key competition.

Utilizing capabilities as a tool in your project management portfolio has other significant advantages as well. Capabilities provide a framework that can help spur innovative thinking and challenge project teams to think beyond current state requirements. Capabilities, if well defined, can also help project teams to frame out high level requirements more quickly and efficiently than the traditional blank-slate requirements definition effort. Finally, and most importantly, capability maturity models provide a framework for continual improvement; if utilized as a management tool, capability maturity models can measure progress over time and challenge employees and stakeholders to get to the next level.

While simple business requirements development has been a tried and true approach for decades, simple and static requirements can only take you so far. Leading businesses and project managers are discovering that capability maturity models can contribute to developing – and maintaining – provocative business strategies and solutions that can grow and be continually improved over time.

While capability maturity models are best known in the software engineering area, business professionals specializing in areas such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) are developing and utilizing the CMM frameworks to define, develop, and measure their solutions and strategies.

It’s about time. Businesses have been relying on a simplistic model of requirements definition for decades. While this model has served them well, requirements alone can be static, difficult to measure, and often represent only the current state of business. Capability models, on the other hand, can provide businesses with a blueprint and yardstick that can identify tangible long-term goals and measure progress along the way.

Leaning solely on requirements just won’t cut it anymore.

Inside Jobs, October 10, 2008

Get PAID: A Unique Approach to Customer Experience Design

Customer experience management can be a complex animal. In order to deliver a holistic solution that works, businesses must effectively align people, process, and technology dimensions across geographies, markets, and channels.

Experienced project managers know that aligning people, process and technology is critical. There have been many business methods, tools, and techniques for aligning these dimensions, but some fall short in tying them together.

A relatively new and straightforward approach for designing holistic and comprehensive customer experience solutions is PAID Diagramming. While the elements of PAID Diagramming are relatively straight forward, the single illustrated view that it provides represents an innovative and holistic approach to customer experience solution design.

The exact origins of PAID Diagramming are not known, but I’ve formalized and refined the technique with numerous clients and projects. P.A.I.D. is an acronym that stands for Process, Application, Integration, and Data:

1. Process Layer: Identifies the high-level business process that enables the customer experience. This layer may also be utilized to represent the customer experience process from the customer’s perspective.
2. Application Layer: The application layer identifies the set of applications that are utilized to support the process layer. Simple lines are utilized to represent which application enables each discrete process step.
3. Integration Layer: The integration layer identifies the major information subject areas and illustrates the linkage between applications and data sources.
4. Data Layer: The data layer identifies the various physical or logical data sources and illustrates how data is integrated with various applications.

A PAID Diagram combines these layers in a series of swim-lanes to provide an architectural view of how processes are enabled by information technology:

THE PAID DIAGRAM MODEL

While the PAID Diagram approach may appear simplistic and straightforward, the approach provides numerous benefits when dealing with complex processes such as customer experience management:

1. Creates a Holistic View: The PAID Diagram combines process and discrete technology enablers in a single view. This provides a clear linkage between process and technology that is typically overlooked in process modeling or technology-based data flow or use-case modeling.
2. Enforces a Process Centric Approach: The PAID diagram starts with the process-layer; an approach that establishes and reinforces a process-centric viewpoint for solution design.
3. Enables Detailed Analysis: Current State PIAD Diagrams provide a holistic view of potential ‘pain points’ in the customer experience process. For example, the process layer can illustrate bottlenecks or disconnect, the application layer can illustrate capability gaps or unnecessary redundancy, and the integration and data layers can illustrate where duplicate and disconnected customer data may reside.
4. Clarifies Future State Visions: PAID Diagrams can be created to reflect the current or future state environment. A future state PAID Diagram provides a single view of how a proposed solution would enhance the customer experience process or specific capability areas.
5. Provides an Architectural Viewpoint: The holistic nature of the PAID diagram provides business and technical architects with a modeling tool necessary to align the various dimensions of the business. When applied across multiple functional areas, PAID Diagrams can be combined to create an enterprise-wide customer experience blueprint that can help to drive customer relationship management, operations, and information technology strategies.

Like most solution modeling methods, PAID Diagrams work best when the appropriate level of structure and discipline is applied to the model. To get the most out of the PAID Diagramming method, businesses should follow some basic best practices:

• Create a Process Hierarchy: PAID diagrams are based on processes. If your company doesn’t have a formal process model, create one. A more formal process model will help to drive the PAID diagramming exercise.
• Keep It Simple: Don’t try to map all processes on a single PAID diagram. Instead, break your processes and diagrams into a hierarchy so that additional levels of detail can be illustrated on a separate PAID Diagram, as appropriate.
• Don’t Over Think Technology: Don’t over think the exact structure or location of physical technology assets or databases. The intent of the PAID diagram is to illustrate enabling relationships. The PAID Diagram is not intended to be a formal IT Architecture Model (but it can help in that regard too.)
• Annotate the Diagram: The more details you can provide with each link, the more meaningful the diagram will become. For example, showing the specific data elements that are being pulled from a database will help identify potential issues or opportunities.
• Use a Standard Modeling Tool Like Visio: For Windows-based computing environments, businesses should utilize a standard business-modeling tool such as Microsoft Visio to create and maintain your PAID Diagrams.

Having helped to design, develop, and implement countless business strategies and solutions in my career, I can honestly say that the PAID Diagram is one of the most useful tools in my toolbox. In businesses where I have used this technique, nearly every one of them have adopted the method as part of their stand solution design methodology.

It just goes to show you that often the simplest of techniques are often the most effective.

Inside Jobs, October 1, 2008

Customer Experience Wars: Wireless Edition

The wireless telecommunication industry continues to be highly competitive as the major carriers slug it out to compete for an increasingly elusive and fickle customer. While major players such as Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T Wireless and U.S. Cellular were once content to compete on value, call quality, or network coverage – there has been a noticeable shift to a new competitive battleground: the customer experience.

The shift in strategy is due to a changing wireless industry landscape. The maturing industry is being characterized by increasing market saturation, industry consolidation, flat or declining revenue per customer, and generalized commoditization of products & services. As a result, the traditional “Five P’s” of Marketing (Price, Product, Place, Promotion, and People) are becoming less effective as the major players seek ways to gain a strategic advantage.

To respond to these new challenges, major wireless carriers are doubling their efforts to create a meaningful emotional connection with their existing customers while (hopefully) attracting new customers. In some cases, the shift in focus towards a differentiated customer experience has been subtle. For other companies, the change in messaging is in stark contrast from previous marketing efforts.

Sprint

Old: Sprint became well known for their ‘pin drop’ commercials that promised the best possible call quality.

New: Sprint’s more recent ads are clearly focused on the customer experience. Helping customers get the most out of their smart phones is a clear shift to a more customer-centric focus.

T-Mobile

Old: In several of T-Mobile’s early ads, the clear focus was on value as they featured their ‘whenever’ minutes and emphasized price.

New: T-Mobile has made a clear shift to a more customer-centric approach; In their latest adds, they emphasize individual and family needs while showcasing real-time account personalization.

U.S. Cellular

Old: U.S. Cellular has always been an industry leader in customer service. Many of their early ads followed the industry, however, and focused primarily on the value element of free incoming calls.

New: U.S. Cellular’s latest efforts have introduced a new brand promise; “Believe in Something Better.” Their ads clear shift the focus away from the handset or network and focus on a more rich and emotional experience.

Verizon

Old: Verizon’s early advertisements hammered home that the focus was on the network. Their “Can You Hear Me Now?” campaigns have been very effective in hammering home their network-focused strategy.

New: Verizon’s current advertisements continue to focus on the network. However, we see a shift from the straight forward ‘Can you hear me now?’ to more engaging situations that attempt to explain how the network can help customers avoid a bad experience – or dead zone.

AT&T Wireless

Old: AT&T (previously Cingular), like other wireless carriers focused their early advertising efforts on value with no roaming or long distance charges.

New: The latest AT&T Wireless commercials paint different customer scenarios that could be avoided if they had AT&T’s service. Although still product-centric, these ads seek to paint the picture of a better customer experience.

Summary

The wireless industry customer experience wars will likely become more pronounced in the coming years as the market become more saturated and increasingly commoditized. Although recent economic factors will prompt consumers to place greater emphasis on price and value, expect the major wireless carriers to continue their battle to differentiate based on customer experience.