Jeanette – Soluble problems

Gossip, gossip, gossip

Yes, there has been a major excitement at work, and every office is buzzing. Nick has shaved off his beard. It took a little while to percolate, but once people realised, there was a continual stream of people coming to check this, that and the other, and make sure to get a good look at the previously-concealed jawline. Needless to say, it was Jeanette who stepped right out there and asked why he’d done it. And lo and behold, our unremarkable coder has managed to bag himself a starring role in his local village production of The Wizard of Oz.

He explained that some years ago someone had heard him sing, and suggested that he would be an asset. So he had joined the chorus, and stood in the back row whenever possible. Being painfully shy, he had never admitted to anyone he was there, but apparently there is photographic evidence that he dressed as a cowboy in Oklahoma. This year, flu and children and university had struck at the available menfolk. He had boldly stepped into the breach and auditioned. (I would have paid good money – or money with no moral qualities whatsoever – to have seen that) and either due to his assets or the company’s liabilities, he had been given the role of the Tin Man. This is a part that demands a certain absence in the facial hair department, so he had ventured into the local Boots and bought one of those cut your own hair devices to remove all the long hair, and a razor with seventeen blades at different angles (I may be exaggerating slightly for effect here) to create the required metallic smoothness.

I think that it probably, all in all, lost the company half a day’s work as the news was passed from room to room and cubicle to cubicle. Dates were put in diaries for people to go and see the show.

Even better than that, of course, was what the company gained. Enthusiasm, interest, and a better understanding of developers. They were cheered by people coming in to see them. They were happy that people wanted to know what they did. Even better, the people who dropped by to see the amazing, never-before-displayed chin also dropped by to see what was going to be happening and signed up on the “I’m willing to test” sheet.

I think that the person who made a comment about whether Nick really was “a friend of Dorothy” was being a little unfair. After all, a liking for musicals is perfectly possible to combine with a liking of lego. It’s just a little unusual.

Anyway, I’m definitely going to be buying my ticket for the team night-out to watch him saunter down the yellow brick road, singing “If I only had a heart”. I’ll even offer to give other people lifts.

Sorry, I seem rather to have omitted any user interface information at all, but this is seriously exciting news. I’ll be back on the Doctors V Accountants front real soon now though.

Preparing to return to work

It has been a long break for me, and I have mixed feelings about what awaits me on my return to work. Most of the other staff also took the week off between Christmas and New Year (though Jiri did not). I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I always feel that I should invite Jiri round for Christmas lunch and never do. He is probably perfectly happy on his own.

There is the standard stuff that always appears when you have had a break. The stack of problems that people discover because they’re not really working but are exploring the software to have something to do. The new features that Gavin has invented while going on a long walk after an all-night party. The new contacts that David has made while playing golf on Boxing Day, and their suggestions for what is needed to penetrate new markets. The stale issues that people couldn’t deal with just before Christmas so they put on the pile to be dealt with after Christmas when they would feel more inspired and less jaded.

All the tinsel that draped the stairs and monitors has been put away. Jiri is very happy because he managed to get an enormous amount done while the office was empty. The cleaners haven’t been in over the new year so his desk is festooned with crumbs and empty packets of Czech festive items. Jack isn’t back yet – he’s gone ski-ing with his girlfriend. Mr Grumpy is in, and he is delighted to be back at work. For someone who complains so much, he seems to enjoy life far more than most of the people I know.

I promised that I would provide a systems analysis of the company and I am just considering how to do it. Like most small companies, it consists of a series of departments, each run by a manager. Departments contain some specialised staff and some people who have ended up there and learnt on the job. In a good company, the departments will be work-shaped. That is, a department has a function to perform and its staff and systems enable it to carry out the function within the department. That’s easy if it’s a closed function, but speaking from experience, every function will require (at the very least) information from the rest of the company.

For example, marketing has a big marketing push to carry out in the new year – get customers before the end of the tax year in April, when they’re likely to have some extra budget to spend. Marketing need to know all the stuff about customers patterns of purchase (which is their own skill) and they need to feed that back into the company. They also need to know what the company is producing that they can sell in the new year. How do they do that? Do they get the over-optimistic views of GandD, or do they get the more realistic views of Ian? Do they have to come and chase and check whether what they have been told is true, or will the right information be passed on at the regular meetings? Have they got the experience to discount GandD’s over-optimism, and if so, how do they know which bits to discount? This is not something that can be codified, because the (say) 30% of stuff to discount will change each time? This is skill, but to be able to learn the skill, you have to know what goes in and what goes out. You have to know at what point the product starts to stabilise and you have real information to deal with. And from that, you have to find out what customers want and feed that back into development.

So marketing has several roles:
1. To sell stuff to customers (this is how it’s seen within the company, anyway)
2. To understand what the company produces and when it will be ready
2. To understand what customers need and when they buy it (that’s their own skill that enables them to do their job)
3. To tell the company what customers need and when they buy it
4. To create a trustworthy competent public image for the company

Now Jeanette is fabulous at selling. She’s pretty good at knowing what the company produces and how much of GandD to ignore. And when to ask them what is actually happening. And when to tell them stuff is a waste of time. But I’m not sure how much all of her knowledge about customers – why they buy, and even more importantly, why they don’t buy, filters back into the company. Should it? Can Jeanette’s sense of what people want be as important as what David picks up on the golf course?

Marketing, what marketing?

Someone asked me if there was a marketing department at this company, because they thought it was a bit implausible that there were that many engineers but no marketeers. Well, yes (you know who you are), but I’m not totally au fait with what they do.

Obviously I know about what they do: they redesign the website, they write blogs, they keep up a presence on twitter, they go to shows, they take out advertisements in appropriate places, they check whether it’s worth being in google AdWords, they buy lists of GPs, they talk to previous customers and so on and so on.

But I’m not sure what they actually do. Is this because I’m incredibly lazy? Or incredibly uninterested? Or because the summaries that appear in the company newsletter are not terribly informative? Or because (whisper it) communication in this company is absolutely dreadful.

To be fair, communication in most companies is absolutely dreadful. People always thinks there are secrets going on behind their back. The urgent strategy planing meeting that had the head of marketing (Jeanette), Gavin and David in it and we never heard what decisions were made. This may, of course, be because no decisions were made, but I know that Jeanette was trying to get GandD to commit to what was going to be in the next product so she could splash out for ads in the Lancet…
And GandD wouldn’t bite.

Jeanette is one of those women who make me feel tired just to look at her. She’s slender and blonde and wears boots and looks amazing at all times. She can sell hot air to Parliament and bull terriers to babies. And she seems to be permanently on a motivational high. “Come on team, let’s see if we can get another ten orders by tonight” she’ll say, “Who’s with me?” And when she has a spare minute she’ll be running marathons for cystic fibrosis research or jetting off for a spa week on a Greek island to cheer up her sister-in-law.

Jeanette is busy seeing how we could alter the product so it would be suitable for care homes and private secure units. She’s looking at what regulation is coming out of the government about what these people will need and she reckons that there’s a huge untapped market.

And David agrees. There’s a whole lot of legislation that needs to be chewed down and flagged up, what your levels of staffing need to be, how many people you have on your books, where you can make things more or less efficient, how you rotate your on-call staff, how you can manage handovers effectively. We could integrate it with a little mobile note-taking system that doctors could carry with them when they go on call so they could…. And so it goes on. Questions of data security and encryption and touch screen infection issues….

And Gavin loves all that. He’s quite keen on encryption and security and new ways of setting it up. And can we get secured prescriptions sent directly to a chemist for an out of hours call… and so forth and so on. I don’t know the ins and outs of it. I would love to shadow a doctor or two and see what they actually did and what was really needed, but we don’t have time for that, says David, we know what they do, we know what they want, we just have to produce it. And if you developers weren’t so inefficient we’d have a product by now. Didn’t you estimate that it would be finished by September so we could test it in time for the New Year and it would be ready to go when people are spending their budgets left over from this tax year?

“Yes” says Ian, “But you’ve changed the spec four times since then.”