It is all about The Customer

February 24, 2011 in CIO,Customer,Leadership with 6 Comments

Photo courtesy of FailPost.com

I need to make it clear what I mean when I talk about The Customer. The clue is in capitalisation of the two words. I am talking about the person that buys the company’s products or services not the “internal customers” or even the CEO (although you need to be careful how you push back on ideas from the boss!)

It is all too easy to forget why your company exists. People get caught up in the project issues, politics and day to day operational issues. As a result some strange decisions get made that have little to do with delivering better products for the customer or even creating shareholder value. One of my pet hates is pet projects that have no real customer or even business benefit.

Whenever you are making a decision it is worth taking the time to ask three simple questions:

Is this going to make things better for my Customers?

Is it going to make life better for my people?

Will this decision make the business better and create shareholder value?

If you can’t answer yes to at least one of those questions then you need to stop the activity immediately. Don’t be afraid to challenge those that claim that their “great idea” meets these criteria you will be amazed at how many things we get involved in cannot pass this simple test when challenged.

Too often we in the IT department are seen as being out of touch by other people within the business and make strange decisions where we do IT for the sake of IT are often at the heart of it. This doesn’t mean that you don’t experiment to learn if something has value, but does everybody really need the latest iPad to figure out if it has a business benefit? Technology is great but it is an enabler to make lives better for Customers and profits for the business. We need to and must want to use our technology, process and people skills to make better products and generate wealth for our investors.

One of the things that I loved about one of my previous employers, Tesco, was that these sorts of questions were asked regularly. I could be in a meeting discussing the business case for a programme of work and if someone said that it wasn’t the right thing for the Customer and there was a general consensus that it was true then that was the end of the meeting. If it wasn’t right for the Customer then we weren’t doing it no debate, no more wasting time and no wasting more company resources on irrelevant ideas.

What simple criteria do you have for evaluating decisions without having pull out a spread sheet?

 

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  • http://ericbrown.com Eric D. Brown

    Great Stuff Neal. Very very important for everyone in the organization to remember. If this project doesn’t bring some form of value to the customer, is it really worth doing?

    Of course you’ll always have some customer centric projects (HR functions, Finance, etc) but the majority of work an IT group does should be based around delivering value to the customer.

    At a previous client of mine, I helped them come up with the following three questions for deciding whether a project gets the green light (or the red light if its already started).

    1.) Is the project needed for base infrastructure? Note: These are the ‘un-sexy’ projects that must be done to ‘keep the lights on’,

    2.) Does the project help us meet one of our strategic goals? How?

    3.) Does the project deliver real, measurable, value to the customer? How?

    Using those three questions helped my client cut back on a lot of pet projects and non-essential projects. In fact, those three questions led to the hiring of more IT staff because there was more budget available for the necessary projects.

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  • http://www.neiljpearce.com Neil Pearce

    Eric great set of questions there. I agree that we need to deliver base infrastructure improvements and again I would insist that these have the Customer in mind e.g. Monitoring should be designed to reflect what the Customers experience is likely to be, not simply a nice dashboard for us in IT to look at our latest VM toys!

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