Clever Discounting

I went into a jewelry store today that had big signs out front reading, "Up to 70% off!" Inside, most of the displays were labeled with "Everything here 50%, plus an additional 20%!" At first blush, that's 70%, right?

Wrong. Since the 20% is taken off after the 50% off has been calculated, the 20% only applies to half the retail price. That is, 10% of retail, which makes the item actually 60% off, a perfectly valid amount in "Up to 70%."

60% off was a perfectly good discount for the item I purchased, and while I'd prefer 70% off, that 10% was in some ways worth observing the cleverness of the discounting scheme. Caveat emptor!

I've Done It (for the next two weeks...)

In 1994, Scott Adams published what I think was one of the funniest Dilbert comic strips.

For the next two weeks, I have that job! My work with the Connect team is finished, but I don't start with Office Live (my new position, still at Microsoft) until January. Sweet bliss!

Fame

The absolute value of “infamous” is “famous.”

Next, Build a Great Team

In a previous post, I wrote about picking the right person for a task. The process scales up for looking at a team and analyzing what the team should do and who the next hire should be. The first step is to take a look at every task the team does or should be doing today. This will be, by necessity, a fairly high level task area. “Update screenshots based on feedback” is too narrow a task. “Write specifications” is about right. If the list is more than about 10-15 tasks, you’re probably defining the tasks too narrowly, dealing with a team larger than what I’m considering here (that is, a workgroup of up to about 10 people,) or your team is way over-committed. I’ll discuss the latter two problems in a moment, but for this first step, you should make sure you have broad categories.

Next, go through the suitability exercise for each member of the team for each task the team does, figuring out what each member likes and how skilled he is at the task. This fills a matrix that allows you to cross-reference tasks and team members and tell at a glance where the strengths and weakness of the team are. I’ve created a fairly simply sample matrix for a team with three people and four general tasks so we have a basis for discussion.


On this chart, “++” represents “Cultivate,” “+” represents “Educate”, “-“ is for Restrict, and Disallow is blank.

When presented this way, the nature of the team practically leaps from the page. Let’s discuss some specifics anyway. The person that should take on a leadership role for each of the first three tasks is clear. Bob should focus on requirements, Joe on specifications, and Mary on presentations. There’s no need to ask Mary to spend much time on requirements, despite her skill in that area, because Bob has it covered and Joe wants to learn. The whole team is well equipped to produce specifications, which is very good, since I based this loosely on a program management team where that’s the top priority.

Asking Bob to present for executives would be a very bad idea. So much better would be to ask Joe to be a presenter, but have him work with Mary to prepare the presentation. Mary gets the opportunity to be a leader and mentor, but Joe gets to grow his skills. With this particular mix, we have a great situation because Joe gets to lead on specification writing, and Mary gets the growth opportunity (along with Bob.)

The team clearly has a problem in the support area, though. There are two skilled individuals, but it’s a part of the job that neither of them really want to do. Asking them to do it, despite all the other good stuff they will get to do, is going to be a source of friction. There’s two ways a manager can handle this. First of all, he can try to shed that responsibility altogether. In a larger organization, this may well be possible, and the example certainly suggests there are other teams around based on the nature of the tasks. Attacking the problem with concerns about team morale and building stronger focus for the team would be good, defensible arguments. In effect, we’re addressing the concern about the team being overcommitted that I mentioned above.

Another solution is to hire the next addition to the team and use the need for a good support person as a way to qualify candidates. In fact, a person with a “Cultivate” level of support suitability and an interest in either presentation or requirements skills would actually be a great addition to the team, even if they hate writing specifications. For a program management team, this would not be obvious without going through an exercise like this.

This process is scalable beyond the workgroup level. If you roll up the overall team into a single team suitability column, you’ll get “Educate” (or maybe “Educate+” if I can slightly mangle my own methodology) for the first three tasks and “Restrict” for last. Also, in the example, the first three items could perhaps be rolled up into “Program Management” with an “Educate” suitability level. If the larger organization that contains this team does the exercise across teams against a task level where the tasks have been rolled up into more general groupings like this, similar analysis at the workgroup level can be done. There’s no reason that the columns can’t represent whole divisions or that the task rows can’t represent lines of business, it just takes more work to do the bottom up accumulation of data.

If any of my readers has an opportunity to try this out with a team, I would be very interested in hearing about what you find out and how this has allowed you to change the team for the better.

Could This Really Be His Name?

The AP has a "News of the Weird" article (linked here on MSNBC) about a lingerie shop using live models in the window. The last paragraph includes a quote from an investigating officer who says no crime is being committed. His name is supposedly Lt. Peter Couture.

Do you think this could be real? "Peter" is vulgar slang for a penis. "Couture" is high-fashion clothing created by designers (such as lingerie.) I can't help but think this is bogus.