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Not a Royal Flush
The following is loosely based on a true story...
The other morning the Chief Technical Officer ("CTO") arrived early in the office and noticed that we were experiencing a technical difficulty with an essential piece of office equipment. The plastic stick behind the toilet handle was broken and, as such, the toilet would not flush. Prioritizing this crisis in the typical techie fashion, he determined that first thing in the morning this might only be assigned as a “low” severity problem (doesn’t prevent user from doing what needs to be done). However, he considered that as the day wears on it could quickly be escalated to “extreme” (makes this portion of the office unusable). The CTO is renowned for his ability to determine and implement workarounds for problems, so of course he came up with a work around for this dilemma and left a note on the back of the toilet: “Lift, Dip, Pull”.
Now this work around certainly worked. However, lifting a porcelain lid and dipping your hand into the cold, wet crevices in the back of a toilet tank to pull the chain results in a less than pleasant user experience and may even make users avoid using the device, which in turn could lead to other office complications.
So along came the consulting team, making do with scarce resources and their own ingenuity. They removed the broken handle, strung an old broken mouse cord through the hole and tied it to the chain. They placed the Mouse on the back of the toilet tank.
This allowed for easy, intuitive use by simply pulling the cord. Of course, the sales department complained because clicking the mouse produced no results, but the consultants quickly realized this was only a training issue and dealt with the problem. There was an elegant simplicity to this harmonious solution.
Not be outdone, the CTO decided he could improve on the functioning solution by tying the cord into a knot, shortening the cord and leaving the mouse hanging down the outside of the toilet tank, leaving the excess cord in the tank. This was very aesthetically pleasing, but sadly it was implemented without proper testing and failed to function as expected. After removing the excess cord from the tank, you still had to wait until water was completely out of the tank and then lift the mouse to stop the flow. Even after training, it seemed that the users could not consistently use the product properly - particularly the sales department.
In the end, user complaints resulted in management being alerted. Management promptly scheduled a series of meetings with each department to study the problem and all review all possible solutions. The engineering department suggested they could easily rig up a mechanism that would flush the toilet when the user clicked either mouse button. Marketing enthusiastically suggested replacing the toilet with a new, button-push flushing model. Sales suggested relocating their workspaces to the nearest golf course.
When the janitorial service arrived on the weekend, they noticed the problem, ran out and purchased the proper replacement part, thus resolving the situation to everyone’s satisfaction.
And the moral of this story is...
Well, it really is a little obvious - be very careful when you flush the toilet.
On a more serious note, this little story is illustrative of the convoluted approach we sometimes see to resolving a broken business process. The starting point in trying to automate or improve a process should be to review the business process (and the people operating the process), and "fix the broken handle" first, before trying to throw new technology into the mix. That's something we at Blue Link strongly support. Where appropriate, we assist our customers in this endeavour.
Credit (or blame) for this article - Mike Miner and Stephen Thorne.
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