A recent MIT Sloan Management Review article extols the value of ‘Finding the Right Job for Your Product’. The thrust of the article is that:
‘A “job” is the fundamental problem that a customer needs to resolve in a given situation.’
And:
‘... the precipitating event that allows the winning strategy of an emerging company to coalesce is the clarification of a job that customers need to get done for which its product is being hired. It is only when the job is well-understood that the business model and the products and services required to do it perfectly become clear.’
The article illustrates this philosophy by the telling the story of a restaurant that explores the reasons why its customer buy their milkshakes. A researcher observes the behaviour of customers and conducts interviews to determine what ‘job’ is being fulfilled by the milkshake.
Surprisingly, 40% of the milkshakes are purchased in the early morning by single customers who consumed the milkshake in their cars on the way to work.
Interviews revealed a common theme – individuals facing a long boring commute in a car who needed to make the daily journey more interesting. Importantly, these customers faced some real constraints: they were in a hurry, they were wearing work clothes and they only had one hand free.
But why milkshakes? Couldn’t another product suffice? Some competitive analysis revealed that the milkshake did the ‘job’ better that anything else. Bagels were dry; bagels with cream cheese or jam resulted in ‘sticky fingers and gooey steering wheels’. Bananas didn’t last long enough to solve the boredom of the long commute and donuts didn’t stave off hunger long enough.
With a milkshake – it took 20 minutes to consume the viscous fluid and, at the end, fingers and clothes remained clean and hunger was satisfied until much later in the day.
A key insight – ‘it didn’t matter that the milkshake wasn’t a particularly healthy food because that wasn’t the job it was being hired to do’.
The result of this understanding of the ‘job’ the milkshake was performing – the restaurant moved the dispensing machine to the front of the counter and started selling prepaid swipe cards to improve the speed of delivery. The restaurant also started to make the milkshakes thicker so that they would last longer into the journey and added chunks of fruit – not to make them more healthy! – so that ‘drivers would occasionally suck chunks into their mouths, adding a dimension of unpredictability and anticipation to their monotonous morning routine’!
I read this article at an opportune time – as over the past weeks we have been grappling with the challenges of explaining the ‘value proposition’ that our products provide. As you might imagine, for a product range that is fundamentally based on software engineering, this is not as easy as it might at first appear.
After much discussion, debate and angst, our team came up with the following description for our TeamGuide product – a product that is quite complex in terms of its integration into Microsoft Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server, SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office:
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TeamGuide Overview
Process MeNtOR TeamGuide is a unique software innovation that leverages the ‘process infrastructure’ created by VSTS to bring process ‘alive’ within the development environment and make process useful to the entire project team.
Built entirely on TFS, the integrated wizards in TeamGuide enable the project team to create Work Items on a ‘just in time’ basis. The wizards generate Work Items that contain comprehensive process guidance based on the workflow within Process MeNtOR. Improved integration with MS Excel and MS Project provide enhanced planning and scheduling capabilities for continuous real-time project updates.
Customer Needs - Understanding the Problem
Despite the fact that mature software development processes have been available for at least the past ten years, we continue to see software projects fail. Often these failures are the direct result of an incorrect level of process or process not being embraced by the entire team.
Software Development processes have been characterized by their static content. Web-enabling improves access and search-ability, but does little to make the process relevant to the specific project or what the Developer is doing right now.
Processes are often not applied properly across the entire project team because there has been no interaction between the developer and the process. Rarely is the process used by anyone other than the project manager. Static processes are often not relevant to the day-to-day activities of the developer and there is little incentive for them to be followed.
In order for a process to be useful to an entire project team it must have two essential elements: it must be interactive and it must be flexible to meet the specific needs of the project.
Process MeNtOR TeamGuide Solution
Every organization and every project has different needs when it comes to the level and style of process required. Projects that carry a high business or technical risk may require a formal approach to requirements, e.g. a major B2B integration. Some projects may need to be SOX compliant and require a high level of traceability and transparency. Other projects are likely to be exploratory in nature, where the requirements are not defined before the build commences. To cater for these common scenarios, TeamGuide provides a range of pre-defined project roadmaps that allow companies to select the right level of process to suit the style and size of the project.
TeamGuide Project Roadmaps provide a time-sequenced set of best practice activities, tasks, deliverables, review and approval mechanisms. Project Roadmaps enable project teams to be ramped up quickly and provide a great starting point for project planning. However, even the best plans don’t always survive contact with the realities of project execution.
TeamGuide provides a series of planning wizards over and above the New Team Project wizard that allow the project to be planned on a phase-by-phase basis – enabling the project to switch between Roadmaps mid-flight if required. Additional wizards allow Team Leads to identify and define the detailed tasks required to meet project objectives.
The wide range of pre-defined Project Roadmaps, combined with the ability to customize these Roadmaps to suit the size and style of the project, ensures that TeamGuide delivers on the need to provide process flexibility.
The wizards within TeamGuide generate customized Work Items within TFS. The innovative and distinguishing feature of these Work Items is that they contain detailed, rich text process descriptions and diagrams which provide the explicit guidance to the Developer at the time they require it most – at the point of execution within their development environment.
Enhanced integration with MS Excel and MS Project enables the time phased capture of Actuals and Estimates for each task. After the developers update the Work Items at the end of each week, the Project Manager can update the schedule with the programmers’ latest estimates from TFS and use those figures to report progress to management. This turns the MS Project schedule from an overhead used only for planning purposes into a true ‘what-if’ tool that is relevant to the whole development team.
By injecting detailed, relevant and timely process guidance into the heart of the development environment –TeamGuide delivers on the need to make process interactive.
The business benefits of a useful, flexible and truly interactive process are many, including improved team collaboration, productivity and efficiency due to reduced communication overheads.
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Brevity is obviously not our strength ... but I think we understand our 'job'.