Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:32 AM
"It’s like we said on the iPad: if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, EVER think about that stuff."
I love that quote. Why?
Because it shows why Apple is uncompromising in trying to bring their customers the best user experience that they possibly can. It is exactly the reason that they don't launch mediocre products, in spite of media critics who think, for example, that Apple should have launched a net book or are impatient for features that other phones have, but that are poorly executed. They won't do something the way everybody else does it when they believe that they can find a better way.
We try to take the same approach in developing business software applications. For the most part, our customers are not programmers; they're not operations experts; and they're not mathematicians. But they are really smart business managers who want to use business analytics to solve important high-value problems quickly. They want to think about getting to the solution – not how to write equations or how to integrate applications or how to program a spreadsheet.
For example, when we design a
form we have certain criteria that must be met, such as:
- Minimize redundant data entry by using form objects such as drop-down menus
- Enable and disable controls based on the users selection
- Avoid the need to display "Error" screens – if we come to a point where a user might get an "Error" screen, then we try to see how they got there and how we can prevent it.
- Make sure a full description of each form's functions is one click away.
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Feb 22, 2010 @ 05:25 AM
"Does it make the decision for me?"
That's a question that somebody asked me again last week, and it is a question that I hear often from people when I tell them about our software. Underneath this question there is an unspoken worry that using a decision analysis tool will somehow override their often very good subjective decision-making ability and authority. I answer it by explaining that it is something like the difference between digging a basement for a house with a hand shovel or a using back-hoe: you still get to choose where and how the basement is dug (the most important subjective decision), but the back-hoe will give you a much faster and better result.
In other words, a good decision analysis tool will enhance and support your subjective judgment by giving you a wider and more focused view of your alternatives.
Decision analysts like to say that they help people make "more objective decisions." This is true if the methodology is sound. (By the way, that is a big "if." Lousy methodology can make things worse.) But in complex and unique business decisions, objective analysis doesn't mean that you can just feed in some numbers and out pops the perfect answer. Instead, a good decision analysis tool will move the subjective analysis to a higher and more strategic level of the decision-making process while leaving the objective number-crunching to the application.
In project portfolio analysis, even using sophisticated tools like Optsee®, there is still a lot of subjectivity that enters into the analysis. For example, there's project risk assessment, budget estimates, and NPV valuations, just to name a few. Then there's assigning weights to the criteria so the project ranking reflects your company's strategy. Finally, there is trying different budget and optimization strategies to select a portfolio that brings you the highest value based on your project set, budget and resource constraints, and business goals.
How is this more or less subjective than doing it manually?
Using spreadsheets or labor-intensive "one model at a time" analyses bog you down in a very low tactical level of subjectively trying to find an optimal portfolio, one project at a time, from billions of possible portfolios. And when you're doing it as a team, this process can quickly become tedious and non-strategic as discussions focus on arguing over the subjective criteria of including or excluding individual projects while losing sight of the big picture.
In other words, when you're at the bottom of a basement digging with a shovel, it is hard to see what the whole thing looks like from the top.
With a portfolio and budgeting analysis tool like Optsee®, you move way up the strategic scale, from picking projects to build a portfolio to picking an optimized portfolio from a few already-optimized alternatives. The "objective" parts – ranking the projects based on value and optimizing against different combinations of business constraints – has already been done for you. So you get to focus your time, energy, and judgment on the most important strategic question – how you can allocate you company's resources to get the highest return from your portfolio.
Like using a back-hoe instead of a hand shovel to dig a basement, using software that moves you up from just making tactical decisions to making more strategic decisions makes sense. But are there places in your company where you're still digging basements with shovels?
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Thu, Dec 17, 2009 @ 05:43 PM
Sunk costs are the costs that have already been incurred and cannot be recovered. We aren't supposed to consider sunk costs when making rational investment decisions, only the future costs.
But people do anyway.
How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, since we've already spent this much on it, we might as well finish it." They're making their decision based on sunk costs.
Ideas have sunk costs, too, only they're different from economic costs. When we spend a lot of time thinking about and working on a new idea, it is hard to let go of it in our minds, even when it proves unworkable or unfeasible. So we keep mulling it over and eventually we can become over-invested in it.
And then we can't evaluate the actual outcomes rationally.
Take the current Health Care Reform debate. Some people have so much sunk into the idea that Health Care Reform must be passed that they want to see anything signed, regardless of what is in the final bill. Others have so much sunk into the idea that Health Care Reform can never be good that they don't want to see anything signed, again, regardless of what is in the final bill.
Both of these groups are basing their positions on their sunk investments into their ideas of Health Care Reform, and not necessarily on the future costs and benefits of what is actually currently being discussed.
About 12 years ago I worked on a potential new treatment for AIDS. It was a unique molecule that ultimately failed in clinical trials. Since then it has wandered as a potential treatment from one disease du jour to another and failed each time. Recently, I heard that it had been proposed as H1N1 flu vaccine booster, again, with no plausible scientific rationale.
So now it is just an interesting molecule with no proven clinical application or clear rational for using or trying it as a future treatment for anything else.
It is an idea whose time came and went more than a decade ago, yet the inventors just kept trying. They can't let it go, regardless of the fact that the odds for success are much longer now than they ever were. But the accumulated sunk cost of their initial promising idea keeps driving them to continue investing in it.
"If we only keep trying…"
Sometimes it is useful to deliberately stop and consider if you're continuing to work on an idea because of what you have already mentally and emotionally invested in it or because of its actual future potential.
And sometimes the only way to avoid investing more time in thinking about a once-good idea is to just start working on a new and different one.
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Tue, Nov 17, 2009 @ 12:36 PM
I’ve also been toying for the last several years with the idea of developing a turn-key module for senior undergraduates or graduate business students in project portfolio management and/or decision analysis using Optsee®. It would be similar to an assignment I had at Wharton in an R&D Management class taught by Professor Earnest Gilmont, except that we didn't use any software or decision analysis tools.
Each student would get a copy of Optsee® that is pre-loaded with an unoptimized portfolio of projects with pre-assigned attributes (such as rewards, costs, resources, risks, etc.) and sets of constraints created for a hypothetical company. The students would form teams, and each team would be assigned to take their set of projects and develop an optimized portfolio that was targeted for different strategic goals. For example:
- one team would develop a portfolio designed to make the company attractive for being acquired
- one team would develop a portfolio designed for implementing an outsourcing strategy
- one team would develop a portfolio to maximize short-term gain
- one team would develop a portfolio to maximize long-term sustainability
Each team would then put together a presentation and/or a paper presenting their portfolio and how they came to agree on it. This would require the team to agree on what attributes to use, the shapes of the attribute curves, the attribute weights, and what constraints they would need to apply.
I think that this could all be put into a nice educational package that would give students an excellent understanding of developing strategic project portfolios based on business goals through their own experiences and by seeing the different portfolios developed by their classmates. It would also give them a fundamental understanding and appreciation of multi-criteria or multiattribute decision analysis, prioritization using Monte Carlo simulations, and optimization against multiple constraints.
So I am curious. How did you learn about Project Portfolio Management? And if you're a professor, how do you teach it?
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.
Posted by George Huhn on Wed, Nov 11, 2009 @ 11:14 AM
We all want one of these buttons, right? Wouldn't it be nice to pry the "Help" button off your keyboard and put one of these in its place? When I want a problem solved, I don't want to look through dozens of menu items and forms, navigate through features I'll never use, and search through websites and PDF files.
I just want my problem solved. And so do your customers.
Two years ago, while everybody else was developing more and more feature-rich (and complicated) video cameras, a company called PureDigital released the point-and-shoot equivalent of a video camera called the Flip Ultra. It was small, inexpensive, simple to operate, and had only essential functionality. And it sold like crazy.
The problem it solved? How to get videos on the web easily and quickly without having to read a novel-sized instruction manual. Today, the Flip Ultra products are the best selling video cameras in the U.S.
Feature-creep and the resultant complexity are big challenges to many technology products. So instead of trying to improve your company's products and services by adding new features, what if you optimized them by removing some features and combining others?
What if your products and services could have only one button: the "Solve My Problem" button? What would it do? And since one button usually isn't realistic, what are the minimum numbers of "Solve My Problem" buttons that you need to solve your customers' problems in a delightful and surprisingly simple way? What if you prioritized your most important and fundamental customer benefits and then offered a product that delivered only those features and nothing else?
In designing our project portfolio management tools, we try to answer those questions every day. For example, we've reduced the effort of prioritizing your portfolio using Monte Carlo simulations to a couple of mouse clicks. If you can answer those questions while nobody else in your industry is even asking them, you may discover a whole new market out there waiting for you.
What are the best uses of your company's dollars and resources? Optsee
® can tell you. Optsee
® is a project portfolio management and budgeting optimization tool unlike any that you've ever seen.
Click here to find out more.