Not surprisingly the call centre is dire, with operators incapable of accessing Orange’s own systems. When they do they deny the existence of a problem, or claim it is the fault of a (non-existent) microwave on the property. Their solution is invariably to demand that I set up a wired connection.

Most UK broadband speed claims seem to be fraudulent these days, but Orange seems to lead the field in both non-delivery and call centre uselessness.

Compiled by the Institute of Interim Management

When businesses look for an interim manager, they sometimes mistakenly value the ‘interim day-rate’ based on the pro-rata cost of an ‘equivalent’ permanent. An interim manager is not an ‘agency temp’.

This worked example shows why:

On top of an (example) £80,000 base salary, add company NI, benefits costs and variable employment costs. Then, factor in all the holidays, bank holidays, sick days, jury service, training days, burst boilers and compassionate leave days that you pay for. The following figures are approximate, but give a good sense of what your employees actually cost you:

Employee base pay (example) £ 80,000 100%

Company national insurance (limits apply. Rounded) £ 8,000 10%
Car allowance £ 6,600 8%
Medical, life insurance and other benefits £ 3,300 4%
Employers’ pension contributions (often higher or ‘final salary’) £ 6,600 8%
Bonus and other incentives (can be much higher) £ 12,000 15%
Employee holidays & absences (52 days not worked, but paid for) £ 16,000 20%

Total costs to the business for 208 days worked: £ 132,000 165%
Total cost to the business for each employee working day: £ 640 0.79%

Employers offering ‘pro-rata’ employee base-pay rate to an interim manager are offering a rate of only c.60% of the ‘equivalent’ employee’s package. That strategy significantly reduces the likelihood that a genuine professional interim manager or executive will express interest in your assignment. Once below a ‘daily-rate’ of 0.8% of ‘equivalent’ employee annual base pay, an interim manager would actually be providing services to you below ‘cost-price’, as they cover their own business costs.

Any ‘savings’ on engaging a ‘cheap interim’ may be swallowed up in time delays and recovery costs if the assignment is not implemented properly or if the ‘cheap interim’ leaves you in the lurch.

The actual value of professional interim managers and executives:

Engage in a fee discussion on the basis of the added value that interim managers offer through:

• Return On Investment – delivery of a solution that gives real benefit to the client
• Speed – being quickly available and able to make an impact quickly
• Expertise – being sensibly over-qualified with a wealth of skills and knowledge
• Objectivity – outside of company politics with a business focused perspective
• Accountability – being instrumental in an assignment’s successful delivery
• Effectiveness – with the authority and credibility to effect significant change or add value
• Commitment – a professional interim approach to deliver then exit in a good way

For real added value, don’t use an ‘agency temp’ pay calculation to attract a professional interim manager. They offer ‘Expertise as a Service’ and handle ‘Business as Unusual.’

[This common sense explanation © Institute of Interim Management (IIM) www.iim.org.uk may be freely reproduced and used, with due credit, to explain interim management (03/ 2011) ]

To the IIM’s model, the DeliveryDemon suggests adding the following factors:

• Recruitment of a permanent employee may have associated search costs
• When the services of a permanent employee are no longer required, there are costs associated with redundancy
• An interim takes responsibility for their own professional development whereas with an employee there are costs for training and time away to train

A few days ago, Micro$oft spewed out a massive download of fixes for Win7. Hidden in the myriad bug fixes is a nasty little payload which throws up messages  insisting that some perfectly respectable McAfee files are viruses. Having scared users with an irritating recurring false-positive security alert, Micro$oft then pops up message after message demanding that the user installs the Micro$oft antivirus product.

This is a recurrence of an old story. Micro$oft has used this trick in the past but recently it seemed to have learned a little sense. It’s clearly reverting to its old, discredited, behaviours.

Listen carefully, Micro$oft. Your hard sell tactics are making it abundantly clear that you’re not interested in distinguishing between respectable software and malware, just in scaring people into parting with money. This is remarkably similar to the behaviour of many of the scammers who lurk on the web.

Whether these false positives arise from poor software design, inadequate testing, or dishonest sales tactics doesn’t really matter. They irritate the hell out of your customers and seriously undermine your corporate credibility.

Get your act together, Micro$oft. PLEASE!

Rather more difficult is the management of stakeholder expectations. The project manager can issue crystal clear bulletins about what has been agreed and what is actually happening. At some point these butt up against stakeholder assumptions, recollections and aspirations. The bits which match will bolster the stakeholder’s world view. The bits which don’t match may provoke a reaction. If they do, that’s all to the good as it allows the project manager to identify and deal with any mismatch between the project as agreed and stakeholder expectations. But not all readers will bother to react. The danger comes when stakeholders skim project communications for the bits which confirm their expectations and ignore the rest. Then expectations may begin to diverge substantially from the project aims. Once that happens to any extent the project will never be a success. It may deliver to scope, cost and timescale but it won’t be viewed as successful because it’s not delivering what stakeholders have come to expect.

For a project manager to become a good stakeholder manager, it’s necessary to look beyond the project’s formal structured communication, and apply the black arts of expectation analysis and expectation management. Catch a straying expectation before it’s far from the straight and narrow and it’s easy to nudge it back on course. Let it stray long enough to become feral and you may not catch it in the lifetime of the project.

Becoming a curator of expectations requires a diverse set of skills, but the core skill is networking. Informal chats can alert the project manager to straying expections much more quickly than any formal discussion. It’s not just the obvious stakeholders who can be useful sources of information. Other projects and BAU targets may hide a reliance on invalid expectations, and people may set such targets as a means of pressurising a project to change its remit.

Sometimes divergent expectations arise because the business has moved on from the original project requirements, and the project may need to change in order to deliver business benefits.

It may not be easy to decide whether expectations should be brought in line or the project changed to meet expectations. This is where stakeholder management feeds into risk and issue management, and through that to the broader project governance and sponsorship if it appears that problems are going beyond the authority delegated to the project manager.

You can, in isolation, deliver a project which meets all its objectives. But unless you step outside the ivory tower and keep abreast of events in the wider context the project may not be seen to be successful. That’s why a project manager needs a taste for coffee, beer and cocktails, not to mention a tolerance for the smoky, windy conditions endured by the huddles which gather outside the doors of most office buildings.

Suppose a company is sold in its entirety, or decides to sell some or all of its book of business. You, the customer, can be sold as part of that deal irrespective of whether you would choose to deal with the buying company. If you have a long term contract for a service such as utility supply, it is highly unlikely that any such sale will trigger a get-out clause in your contract. But the selling company is making money by selling you.

If your employer is sold, again you have no freedom of action. Some roles may be made redundant, others retained. If you occupy a retained role which is unchanged by the takeover you have no right to redundancy, not even if the new employer is one you might never have chosen to work for. Again the seller makes money by selling you.

The bureaucracy collects data on its citizens. Should you be born, or marry, divorce, or die, it becomes a matter of record and those personal details can be sold. Should you become a company director, your details may be sold. Should you decide to exercise your right to vote, your details will be sold unless you opt out, and that doesn’t provide a 100% guarantee. If you require hospital treatment, the consent form hides a proviso that your details will be passed on to a commercial benchmarking organisation called Dr Foster. Yes, our bureaucracy is selling our personal information.

Try being economically active, and it’s no longer a matter of exchanging currency for goods. The seller will move heaven and earth to acquire as much data as they can about you in order to boost their profits. We have become so used to loyalty cards we no longer think of how these little plastic objects are used to capture our likes and dislikes so that we can be targeted with marketing. Buying car insurance? Try doing that without giving away details of your house insurance. Buy a one-off gift online from Mothercare for a friend’s new baby and you have to set up an account which demands a much wider range of details than are needed for the transaction. Set up an Amazon account and every time you log in your transaction history is used to try and make you buy Amazon’s own products and that of the many organisations which use Amazon as a trading platform. Buy an iPhone and you give Apple a record of your movements.

Organisations tend to justify the commercial extraction of your data by saying it is used to give you a better shopping experience. In the DeliveryDemon’s experience, most people are capable of making their own shopping decisions. And targeted marketing models are usually based on such unsophisticated assumptions that random recommendations may well be as effective as their targeted suggestions. The only exception the DeliveryDemon has noticed is in the case of small specialist organisations whose principals have a great deal in common with their customer base.

So who’s making money out of you? And are they paying you for the value they get from you?

Last night the DeliveryDemon was trying to upload a video to Facebook. She kicked off the upload and went to do something else. Half an hour later, the screen still showed a miniscule thread of blue on the progress bar. A quick check with www.speedtest.net showed a download speed of 0.1Mbps compared to the minimum of 4Mbps Orange claim to deliver. The Delivery Demon picked up the phone and right from the start was faced with the Orange attitude to customer service.

• The IVR scriptwriters must have to sit a stupidity test to qualify for the job.
• First an idiotic statement that a customer whose broadband had failed should check the Orange website – and Orange kept repeating this.
• The error status option announced that Orange knew of no faults on its lines.
• Then an announcement that the helpline was busy, why doesn’t the customer just go away and stop bothering them, or call another day if they really must bother Orange.
• Either the IVR script is a lie or the phone staff lie, because after a 20 minute effort to get through to a person, the response was that no faults were being reported and the helpline wasn’t busy.
• Needless to say, dire music punctuated the IVR idiocies, with choices designed to set teeth on edge and increase the ire of the caller
• There was a particularly obnoxious and recurrent sales pitch trying to plug cinema tickets. Bad enough to be paying for an extremely long call to get Orange to sort its service – definitely NOT the time for Orange to ask the customer to spend more money with them

The phone jockeys are no better than the IVR. The DeliveryDemon has enough knowledge of help desks to know that, if the person you’re talking to can’t explain the effect of what they’re asking you to do, then it’s a bad idea to follow their instructions blindly, especially when their command of the English language is poor and their instructions are delivered in a barely intelligible mumble.

• After being told the router was in another room so it would take a couple of minutes to carry out the requested light status check, the Orange moron didn’t bother to hold on for the few minutes it took so it was back to the Orange IVR hell.
• There was a sudden improvement in the line speed, but all too brief.
• It took 40 minutes to get through to Orange this time
• The so-called technical support proposed a configuration change which he couldn’t explain beyond saying that the result would be loss of broadband for a period he couldn’t specify.
• The supervisor who eventually took over actually tried to claim that there was no such thing as a capacity constraint, that no matter how many users there are of a service, performance will never degrade.
• The supervisor also said they weren’t getting many calls. What’s going on here? Is Orange building in delays to its IVR system in the hope that complaining customers will go away?
• After TWO HOURS on the phone there was still no progress.
• After TWO AND A HALF HOURS on the phone, Orange finally admitted that there was a fault on their line.

Needless to say, this phone marathon did not result in the problem being solved. The phone jockeys aren’t competent to resolve problems, the DeliveryDemon had to wait till next day for a call from an engineer. In the meantime she was stuck with a service so poor she had to resort to her mobile for web access.

Next day the DeliveryDemon waited for the call. The agreed hour passed without any action from Orange so the DeliveryDemon picked up the phone again, only to discover that Orange cannot be bothered to make outbound calls, so the promise of a call from an engineer was based on a lie or incompetence on the part of their helpline, apparently a common occurrence.

What the phone jockey should have said is that, when the Orange service fails, it’s the customer’s job to carry out a number of tests over a 24 hour period before Orange will deign to do anything. So it’s another couple of days of a seriously degraded service which is still crawling along at well below 0.5Mbps most of the time, and yet another stint of battling the Orange IVR customer barrier.

Complaining about this fiasco is even more difficult. Orange won’t accept complaints over the phone, and their customer ‘service’ department don’t do email. The DeliveryDemon supposes they find it easier to claim that snail mail has been lost in the post sent to Orange Customer Support, PO Box 486, Rotherham, S63 5ZX.

There is a disturbing tendency for companies to think it is sufficient to set up a service and walk away. Monitoring and preventative maintenance seem to be a thing of the past, with companies expecting customers to do those particular jobs for them. And companies don’t want to deal with the problems their customers do identify, erecting barriers of IVR delay and complexity, and call centres whose staff lack the basic competencies required to deal with customers, never mind resolve problems. The DeliveryDemon disapproves of this trend, and thinks it’s high time for customers to fight back.

It’s not a problem when it’s work-related as the studies normally have a practical application. Since the DeliveryDemon views skills transfer as part of her role, there are always opportunities to share concepts and theories, and there’s often the sort of intellectual challenge which is necessary to ensure that theoretical ideas can be usefully applied in practice.

With practical hobbies there’s usually a like-minded community to discuss matters such as aerodynamics and fluid dynamics, technology, terpsichore, early music, climbing techniques, the making of lace, sports physiology and psychology, all the geeky aspects of equipment, and the like. Through a range of hobbies, the DeliveryDemon has had nerdy discussions on all of these subjects.

Academic subjects are different, unless you’re lucky enough to be based in academe. It’s easy to study the more cerebral subjects in isolation, but what do you do with the information in your head once you’ve read the book or passed the exam? Do your essays become dusty papers in some university file? Do all your bright ideas become faded and dull, forgotten as time passes?

The DeliveryDemon’s friend, Jane Akshar, had a better idea. Jane has been an Egyptology enthusiast for years and has recently been extending her expertise through formal academic study. To share those ideas, Jane has taken her research and academic essays and turned them into a full colour e-book. Have a look at http://www.egyptologycourses.com/products/6-egyptology-essays/

The DeliveryDemon loves this idea. the only problem is that she now feels a need to turn some of her own thinking into something a bit more tangible.

Surprise, surprise, up came a map, along with some detailed directions. Not unsurprisingly, the DeliveryDemon already knows how to get from her village to the small town where the post office is sited. She also knows that the entire road system there is in total chaos due to widespread roadworks, so she wants to identify the post office location and a couple of likely parking options. For that she needs the map.

So what does the website deliver? An extract from the 1:25,000 Ordnance Survey which cannot be zoomed, except in one step to a scale which is too large to see the location in context. There’s no pan option at all, and no layers of useful information like parking. In other words, the site pays lip service to providing a map while giving no consideration to the various ways in which the map might be used in order to get useful directions.

If they can’t deliver something useful, why do they bother?

• Option 1 is the ‘online’ application. What happens? You enter your details online, the passport service prints them off and posts them to you second class, with an SLA of a week, although the claim is that forms are posted within 24 hours. You then sign the documents and post them back with additional paperwork, and the subsequent process is likely to take in excess of 4 weeks.
• Option 2 is to collect a form from a post office offering the Check and Send service – not all post offices offer this, and it costs £8.17 on top of the passport price. This option is likely to take in excess of 6 weeks.
• Option 3 is to request an application form online. That can take 5 working days to get to you, and you still have to get on to the month-plus paperwork trail.
• Option 4 is to phone and ask for a form. Again it can take 5 days to get to you before you get into the application process.

If there’s less than 2 months before you need your passport, there’s a ‘faster’ service. You first have to get an appointment, then travel to one of only 6 regional offices – particularly bad news for anyone living in Inverness given the distribution. It can take 2 weeks just to get an appointment. And even though you may have to travel half way across the country, you must not turn up more then 10 minutes before the appointment time, in case queues makes it appear that the service can’t handle the demand.

Once you get the apppointment, you can choose between the Fast Track, 1 week, service or the Premium, 1 day, service. With the Fast Track service, you must be at home to sign for the passport a week later. With the Premium service, you have 4 hours to wait once your forms have been checked and the cashier has given you a receipt – or overnight if you haven’t been able to get a morning appointment in all but 1 of the regional centres.

In summary:

• Online application – £77.50, 5 weeks
• Check and Send – £85.67, 6 weeks and 2 trips to the post office
• Normal post – £77.50, a week to get the forms, processing time unspecified and high risk of loss.
• Fast Track – £112, a trip to a Check and Send post office or a week to get the forms by any other means, 2 weeks to get an appointment, a day to travel to the appointment, a week to wait, and a day at home waiting for the passport to be delivered.
• Premium – £129, a trip to a Check and Send post office or a week to get the forms by any other means, 2 weeks to get an appointment, a day to travel to the appointment and potentially another day to pick up the passport if you can’t get an early enough appointment for same day collection.

The passport service are investing in sexy technology like phone apps and online tracking of progress. Just how much effort would it take to provide a basic online PDF application form which would deliver a full week’s benefit for most applicants? Priorities?

Let’s face it, once the customer finds details of a location on the web and makes the necessary bookings and payments, it’s still necessary to transport the physical body to the desired venue. It may be possible to delegate the responsibility to a taxi driver or even a chauffeur, but more often there’s a need to drive, or walk from the nearest public transport.

It’s fairly common to find directions on a website, though some directions suffer from the problem of only being meaningful to those who already know the area. Anyway, directions like that are yesterday’s solution. Today’s traveller uses satnav, to drive and, via a smartphone, to get walking directions. And what’s the shortest piece of information these devices need to generate directions? The postcode.

It’s not uncommon for organisations to discourage snailmail by hiding address details on obscure pages of their websites. And even when the address is found, the postcode is not always useful. It may be that the organisation has a mailing address whose postcode refers to a postal arrangement rather than a physical location. And some larger locations may be covered by multiple postcodes, as the DeliveryDemon realised recently, staring across a muddy field and high fence at the roof of her hotel.

It would be so simple for organisations to deliver directions by including on the location page of their websites ‘Enter the following postcode in your satnav to find us’. The DeliveryDemon wonders how long it will be before there is widespread awareness of this interface between the web and the physical world.