Olympics…..We’re Dooooooomed!!!! Jubilee….We’re Dooooooomder!!!!

The Delivery Demon isn’t really much of a spectator so she didn’t bother tying up her credit card limit in the fiasco of Olympic ticket sales. Why put all that effort into a lottery level probability of seeing an event that might be of some slight interest? She stood back from that, leaving the remote chance of getting a ticket to those who really wanted to watch. As the chaos was delivered, she felt a few pangs of sympathy to those sportspeople who, even if they managed to get tickets, had very little opportunity of getting tickets to see the sports they actually participate in. The whole setup seemed pretty half-baked.

Beyond some vague plans to avoid the areas of transport mayhem during the Olympics, the DeliveryDemon has tended to ignore the media hype, but a recurring theme has been carping for her attention in news reports. There seems to be a developing assumption that the Olympics, like the equally-hyped Jubilee, will damage the economy. The DeliveryDemon recollects some reference to think tanks in those reports but a cursory web search hasn’t provided any hard evidence, so perhaps the reporters concerned are inventing or misinterpreting. Whatever the case, the DeliveryDemon has become interested in what those reports imply.

The general theme is that workers will be taking holidays and days off, will be surreptitiously following the events on their mobiles and their work PCs, will be spending long lunches in pubs, watching events unfold. Transport chaos will make people late for work. Workers will be tired and hungover from late night TV watching and alcoholic celebrations. Production will plummet, customer service will suffer, the economy will drag its way into another recession. Two big events in a single year? We’re all doooooomed!!!

So what are the facts behind the scaremongering?

• Yes, people will want time off – they usually do in the summer. But it may be easier to achieve a spread of holiday dates as a significant number of people may choose to avoid holidaying during the Olympic peak times – much as many people avoid taking their break during school holidays.
• Transport chaos? Commuters are used to this but it’s likely to have a worse than usual impact on venue access routes and the air and rail hubs which serve them. That’s not the whole country, and the areas concerned have a relatively high concentration of work which can be carried out remotely with a little bit of forethought.
• People will spend more than they plan then cut back after the event? Pretty normal for any holiday type event, except that the spend will be in the UK.

So far, so normal. No reason to predict a recessive impact from normal human behaviour. So what might these pundits be suggesting?

• All that well-paid Olympics work will disappear in the aftermath, true. Why should that be a surprise to anyone?
• In some – but not all – businesses, less work will be done during the various events and celebrations. Really?
• There will be a fairly heavy demand for time off during the peak period. A bit like Christmas and the school holidays. After all, people work to live, not the other way round.

Either the reporters who come up with these doom-laden headlines lack the most elementary understanding of business planning, or they are trying to deliver the message that UK management is so lacking in basic business skills that the entire country went down the plughole years ago.

The DeliveryDemon wishes that those recruiting for media positions would realise that those jobs have a need for basic commonsense and the ability to use data sensibly.

Delivering Sports Participation

The DeliveryDemon isn’t hugely fascinated by the 2012 Olympics. She didn’t bother with the ticket allocation fiasco. She hopes she won’t be in London, or near one of the few non-London venues during the event. She has no intention of going anywhere to peer through crowds at anyone trotting along with a badly designed bit of metalwork, which is the nearest many Brits will get to the Olympics. She certainly won’t be watching the Olympics on television, as she still hasn’t found a good reason to go out and buy one.

According to BBC talking heads, this means that the DeliveryDemon is not interested in sport. No matter that she walks for miles in the mountains and across country – that doesn’t count. Nor does bodyflying, an activity which tests muscles most people never get round to using. As soon as she finishes rehab from last year’s skydiving accident, she aims to be back flowriding and doing the occasional bit of running. But she’s not interested in sport. The DeliveryDemon was delighted when recovery reached a point that allowed her back in the gym and the pool – but that’s not sport. She’s looking forward to being able to take winter holidays with ice climbing and snowshoeing and cross country skiing and dog sledging – but according to those in the know, she’s not a sporty person. Obviously not, since she isn’t inclined to sit on the couch, munching and drinking, while watching others do something which may be active – or which may be as inactive as darts or snooker or angling or even poker, all of which are skilled, none of which contribute much to the body’s need for physical activity.

There’s a lot of justification of Olympic costs on the grounds that the fact of the Olympics will increase sports participation. It’s a pity that those who made the decisions to spend shed loads of public money didn’t do some realistic thinking:

• What does participation actually mean?
• How can you demonstrate that it’s happening?

Since the powers that spend our taxes clearly haven’t done this thinking, please allow the DeliveryDemon to suggest a few actions and measures.

Work is spread throughout the country so that people don’t have to spend so much time commuting that there’s no weekday time for anything else and no weekend time because weekends are used up with recovering from the week’s commute and doing all the chores there wasn’t time for during the week.

School offer a range of activities within the timetable with sufficient variety so that all children can particpate without feeling useless or stupid, and sufficient competition to give the competitive a way of measuring their success.

Sports funding includes reasonable support for public facilities which provide ready access for the public at times when people want to use them.

Bylaws and bureaucrats do not use health and safety as an excuse to prevent popular and emerging sports like inline skating and skateboarding and freerunning in public places.

Planning decisions require provision of public open spaces including green space, and sports facilties, with properly thought out arrangements for their long term upkeep.

That’s just for starters. The Olympics will long be remembered for the white elephant developments it leaves behind, but any effect it has on sports participation will be as transient as the annual blip  in tennis court use around the time of Wimbledon – but without Wimbledon’s annual influence. If the powers that be seriously want to influence public health for the better, they need to think more pragmatically than low usage monolithic development and nanny state pronouncements.

Delivering Poor Banking Security

The DeliveryDemon has the rather naive expectation that banks who are entrusted with our money should operate reasonably secure procedures. Hang your heads in shame RBS and Barclays.

The DeliveryDemon has had cause to complain to both banks recently. In each case the complaint was about their processes, not anything specific to the account. In both cases an idiot from their customer ‘service’ team phoned up and demanded to know secure account access details before they would consider listening to the complaint. Do they really think it is sensible for someone to give out account password information to a random caller?

RBS, there is no need to access my account in order to hear that it does not constitute ‘faster payment’ if you take details of a payment on Friday and can’t process it till Tuesday unless the I ring again on Monday.

In fact there is no need for your customer ‘service’ to access my account at all. The default action should NEVER be to access the customer account. Basic security is that this should only be done if the customer raises a matter specific to the account, i.e. if there is a genuine need to access the account.

Banks are piling on nuisance value processes to make it more difficult for the customer to access their own money, all in the name of security. It’s about time they got their own house in order, introduced secure internal processes and gave their customer contact staff some basic security training.

Not Delivering Faster Payments

Since the bureaucrats took over RBS, the service has been going rapidly downhill, to the point that now they cannot even operate the faster payments system which banks should have been signed up to for several years.

The online service was never good, a classic example of security completely overwhelming usability. With public ownership, the phone service was drastically reduced. Then the ability to set up advance payments was cut back. The commonest requirement for advance payments is the ten month council tax cycle. It was once possible to set up 6 months worth of payments at a time, but that has been cut back to 3. Instead of 1 oppportunity to forget a payment, RBS has created 3.

The latest service cutback is the faster payments system, to which all banks are nominally committed. This system should, within certain limits, transfer money to the payee’s account within 2 hours. Not with RBS. The latest unintelligent development to their system cannot cope with a payment being set up on a Friday evening. It won’t do anything with it till the Tuesday. If the customer wants a payment to arrive on the Monday, they have to phone again on the Monday. In other words, RBS’s system cannot cope effectively with faster payments for nearly 3 days out of 7. The DeliveryDemon is seriously unimpressed with this constant erosion of customer service.

The gulf between the words ‘public’ and ‘service’ has never been wider. And it’s growing.

Delivering a Drought

It’s not even full spring yet and we’re about to get our water supplies reduced – but not our water bills.

Every time the DeliveryDemon puts something in the waste bin, the drought springs to mind, as do thoughts of how ‘un-joined-up’ this country’s bureaucracy is.

Why? Well, if you live in an administrative area which is committed to the recycling, have you realised that you are using up precious water supplies to WASH the rubbish you pay taxes to have collected?

The DeliveryDemon has nothing against recycling. In fact her household were recycling long before the bureaucrats decided it had to be imposed. Bottles, cardboard, paper, tins, old clothing, garden waste – it all got sorted and composted or taken to bottlebanks or charity shops or recycling centres. No problems and no transport overhead as disposal fitted in with the weekly routine. But now the dead hand of bureaucracy has descended. So:

• We have slop buckets.
  • They’re too small for the remnants from a day of cooking proper food, or even a single meal, so they are forever needing to be emptied into the bigger slop bucket.
  • They stink because they don’t close tight enough to keep the smell in.
  • They’re made of poor quality plastic which isn’t resistant to the acid remnants of food, so they stink even more.
  • Because they stink they have to be washed out at every emptying, and that takes water. So in just one area, that’s over 30,000 of these slop buckets needing washed out at least once a day.
  • Because the bins are never properly emptied, there’s a residue of rotted food wo go in the next collection, accelerating the decay of new food waste.
• Then there’s the bigger slop bucket.
  • It’s not really big enough to hold a week of food waste if you use fresh ingredients and lots of fruit and vegetables. But it’s the only bin that gets emptied weekly.
  • Of course it stinks.
  • It gets pretty filthy by the time it’s been chucked at the bin lorry’s automation then thrown back anyhow on the ground, so it needs washed after every emptying.
  • It isn’t really emptied, just waved at a bigger bin, with no account taken of the fact that week old food debris tends to stick to the container, so that’s another load of water cleaning out the 30,000 bins.
• There’s a massive bin for stuff that doesn’t go into the slop buckets.
  • This is designed to hold about 15 times the amount of rubbish produced by a household that recycles as a matter of course.
  • It’s too light to withstand the boisterous winds in open countryside so local cars and pedestrians are at danger from flying bins.
  • It’s a third bin to be cleaned out, fortnightly for this one.
• There’s an even more massive bin for paper and cardboard and bottles.
  • That’s another fortnightly collection and another bin that needs washed out.
  • Rubbish needs to be washed before going in the bin, or it stinks and the lids are not proof against odour or flies
  • That’s another flying bin on windy days.
• There’s another massive bin – at additional cost – for garden waste

Then there’s the disruption and complication.

• Multiple handling of food waste from one slop bucket to another
• Complex collection arrangements, needing a section in the local paper to remind people which bins go out when.
• Up to three days a week when the peace is destroyed by noisy rubbish vehicles, with the constand grinding and beeping audible for streets around for hours at a time
• Up to three days a week when the roads are blocked by rubbish vehicles whose drivers never pull in to the kerb,  thinking they have no duty of care to other road users

Of course the taxpayer can spend more money on biodegradable bags for all the slop bins. And sit on summer days with the windows closed and earplugs in till the rubbish lorries have gone. That’s what the bureaucrats want us to do. But let’s think about what this is really about.

There’s a need to dispose of rubbish effectively, recycling as much of it as possible. That doesn’t mean it’s necessary to manufacture and distribute 150,000 bins in one small area. There’s no reason why each and every household should turn into a mini waste-sorting and cleaning plant. The council is trumpeting its greenness on the basis of the council doing less, but the full picture is a lot less green.

• The council is generating noise pollution in previously peaceful rural areas and making it worse in town.
• The council, at the taxpayer’s expense, is financing the manufacture and use of 4 times as many rubbish vehicles as were previously needed.
• The council is adding to the overcrowding of roads by blocking them with rubbish vehicles
• The council is worsening the drought situation by forcing people to use water to clean multiple bins

There’s a very well established principle of economies of scale. Apply it to rubbish collection and you end up with the single collection of waste and central sorting. The rubbish industry is becoming ever more sophisticated, with technology becoming increasingly able to separate different types of waste.

The DeliveryDemon wishes her local council would acquire the intelligence to see the difference between effective recycling, and a bureaucratic ego trip which consumes resources and creates pollution.

Delivering Lack of Credibility

Enclosed with the DeliveryDemon’s shocker of a winter gas bill was the most infuriating whinge letter from British Gas. They are clearly ensconced on the current commercial bandwagon whereby suppliers are trying to deny any responsibility for the cost of doing business.

From utilities to airline tickets to online retailers, companies are passing on to their customers the cost of doing business, completely ignoring the fact that normal pricing practice already takes account of this. In other words, these companies are ramping up their profits by double charging. Needless to say, when the cost of doing business drops, the price reduction rarely matches that drop and the reduction is never factored into both of the double charging elements.

British Gas’s whinge was that it had no control over the cost of infrastructure or wholesale prices so, poor profitable mega corp, it was forced into passing on price increases to its customers. So how real is this claim?

First, infrastructure. We have an artificial market here, with money bouncing between the profit-making body responsible for infrastructure and the profit making body responsible for billing. The infrastructure body has no responsibility to end consumers and the billing company has no will to negotiate reductions in the amount it is charged for infrastructure. In other words, there is a serious flaw in the artificial market created by the breakup of utility monoliths.

Gas wholesale prices seems, on the surface, to be more plausible – until you look at the facts behind it. The DeliveryDemon had a quick look at gas bills over the last few years and compared them to wholesale gas prices. Since the price of gas is supposedly less than 50% of the bill, it would be reasonable to expect gas bills to reflect this.

Using 1999 as the base, wholesale prices peaked briefly in 2005, before dropping back to 423% of base. In the same period, unit prices to consumers leapt to 256% of base, staying above 200% of base despite wholesale prices dropping. Current consumer prices are 254% of base, while wholesale prices are 167% of base. Clearly not a good deal for consumers, and confirmation that, while wholesale price increases are passed on, the same cannot be said of decreases.

And what has this meant for British Gas? Profit has gone from £365M to £2,400M, a 650% increase. Dividends per share has gone from 8.6p to 21.6p, a 250% increase.

A simplistic analysis, perhaps. But simplicity has a way of highlighting the important points. And it is very clear that consumers are NOT getting a good deal from British Gas.

The DeliveryDemon has a message for British Gas, and for the many other large corporations trying to mask profiteering.

You are a large, profitable and powerful organisation, and you are not offering customers a good deal. STOP trying to pretend you are hard done by. There is not a cat in hell’s chance of anyone taking your complaints seriously. It just emphasises your role in rip-off Britain.

Delivering Stakeholder Management

It’s relatively easy to identify most stakeholders. Once they have been identified it’s relatively easy to put together a communication plan which allows you to tell them what they need to know. The plan can include two way communication events such as requirements analysis, Q&A events, document reviews and user tests. These are all part of the tried and tested approach to stakeholder management.

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.

How NOT to Deliver Customer Service – #Orange

The DeliveryDemon recollects that one of the Scandinavian countries has decided that access to high speed broadband is a necessity of life, possibly even a human right. They obviously don’t have to deal with Orange.

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.

Delivering Knowledge

The Delivery Demon likes finding out about a diverse range of subjects, but it can feel rather one-sided if there’s no-one with similar interests to bounce ideas around.

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.

Delivering You To Your Destination

The DeliveryDemon despairs!! All she wants to do is renew a passport, using the Post Office Check and Send service. It can’t be done at the local post office, which means travelling elsewhere. So she clicked on ‘View Map’ on the branch finder page of the PO’s website.

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?