Tomorrow is Today – 12/7/2020
How did we get here? It’s a relatively easy question to ask with a not so easy answer. Without boring you with the details, I’ll simply say that after years of consulting and working in corporate America I’ve decided to publish what I feel are best practices for IT that are largely being ignored or overlooked. I’ve threatened for a number of years to start a blog but always put it off for tomorrow. Well, tomorrow is today.
A few years ago a friend and I were working on setting up a 5K fundraiser for a non profit when he looked at me across the table and said, “I don’t care how it happens, I want to click and button and have it done.” What followed was a few hours of design thinking that ultimately led from a clunky registration process to a simple single button. How did we do on the race? It was an abject failure. I think 52 people showed up and we might have had more volunteers working the event than we had runners. But don’t worry, we improved and the next few years saw hockey stick growth but the button was always there.
So why this story? For starters it shows two things in action: succeeding through failure, and keeping it simple. Sure we weren’t great at first, but we learned from our mistakes, modified our iterations, and got better at what we did each time (until we literally could plan a 5K in our sleep). We tempered our expectations and worked through many PDCA (Plan, Do Check, Act) cycles and built a worthwhile event for the runners, the non-profit, our corporate sponsors, and the local government that was a cosponsor. Second, we built everything around the concept that simple was best. We believed that as difficultly rose in any area that people were exponentially less likely to register for, participate in, or refer our event to friends. So we made simple business cards to hand out instead of complicated flyers. We encourage people to register on line with a single button. We staffed and communicated the event so people didn’t have to think. In the end runners came, ran the event, and went home happy. In short, we created an event that didn’t require people to think. Runners run they don’t want to be IT gurus. They want to click a button and go have fun.
My goal with this weekly space will be to look at trends, events, processes, or anything else that intersects with technology and highlight what works well and what needs adjusting. If you are interested in submitting something for discussion feel free to do so as I think I might have enough stuff for a year of this before I run out of material. Next week, I’ll dive a bit deeper in how we can design processes and solutions in such a way that makes them efficient, simple, and user friendly. Until next week…..
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