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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Another reason the world won’t go Digital on schedule, heavily redacted and anonymized:

My wife is the {unspecified position} for a small, boutique {unspecified services} firm. As such, she has to process {unspecified business transactions} constantly. To help with all the needed {non-generic due diligence} (they do a lot of government work), they use a {non-generic screening service] from a fairly well known company in that space.

A few weeks ago, the screening company pushed out a new version of its software and portal.

It was a shambles! What had been a quick, routine part of my wife’s day had become a nightmarish game of frozen screens, endless time on hold, being shuffled around from one support person to another, and STILL not getting the needed {non-generic due diligence} done.

Of course, her sales department was yelling at her too, for being slow in performing the {non-generic due diligence} needed to perform the services they’d sold their customers.

About a week after the rollout, she received the following email, ostensibly from the {non-generic screening service} firm’s CEO:

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From: {Name of CEO}

Sent: {sometime this summer}, 2018

To: {Helpless Customers}

Subject: {Our Flagship Product} Technology Update

Good afternoon,

On {date}, we released our all-new {clever acronym} screening technology. From development through implementation, our goal has always been the same — to deliver the best experience for you, our customers.

Last week’s release was the culmination of more than two years of development. It would be an understatement to say we’re excited. But with that excitement comes an awareness that this platform is far from perfect.

We fully understand that a release this ambitious and of this magnitude is bound to have issues, and you’re likely experiencing some of those issues first-hand. After the first week of wide release, many of the reported bugs have been minor. We are fixing and improving every day.

This initial launch is just the beginning of a new chapter for {company name}. We’re playing the long game — working constantly to fine-tune the technology through your feedback. We hope you already see the power and speed behind this incredible new platform. It’s only the beginning.

As we have for the past {number of years}, we’re here to help. Helpful tutorials and videos {link provided} are available in the resource center {link provided} of the {clever acronym} dashboard. And our friendly team is here to assist you in any way they’re able. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for your patience with us during this transition, as we work aggressively to fix bugs and improve the platform. 

Thank you for your trust in us to be your screening partner. We never take your partnership for granted and work every day to redefine value in {non-generic screening services}.

Sincerely,

{First name of CEO}

{Company logo, address and contact info}

{Inspiring quote from an old NFL football coach}

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Where to start …

Communication: Groucho Marx once asked, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” That was supposed to be comedy, not a serious business message. Don’t send spin to the people with direct experience. Send it to everyone else, to convince them the people experiencing the problem are exaggerating.

Software Quality Assurance: The first rule of SQA is that you always test. Sometimes you test before you put software into production. Sometimes you test by putting it into production.

Before is better.

Your customers’ SQA matters too. Just because you’re a cloud provider, that doesn’t mean you’re providing an “island of automation.” Quite the opposite, as SaaS becomes more important, integrating SaaS applications into the rest of the applications portfolio becomes exponentially more important (actually, polynomially more important, but let’s not quibble).

The consequence: A SaaS provider’s internal testing should be just the beginning. After that its customers should have a chance to regression test new releases to make sure they don’t break internal IT’s integrations.

Along the way, its customers’ end-users would be in a position to discover whether the new release is a turkey, before it’s inflicted on everyone.

The Cloud doesn’t change the rules. It makes them more important. For example, well-run internal IT follows a simply stated rule when it comes to implementing software changes: Always have a back-out plan. If, in spite of SQA’s best efforts, the software turns out to be unusable, internal IT restores the previous version to minimize business disruption.

Just because you’re a SaaS provider that doesn’t mean you get to ignore the basics.

You have to master them.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

“No man is an iland.”

So said John Donne, leaving us, in these more gender-neutral and lexicographical days, to decide how to make use of an otherwise wonderful turn of phrase without ourselves being tainted by gender bias or the spelling anarchy of days past, and also without imposing our own sensitivities by changing someone else’s words who, being demised, isn’t in a position to defend himself.

The quote also got me to wondering: If no one is an island (or iland), is anyone an isthmus?

Which in turn got me to wondering: As the only isthmus I can name is the Panamanian one, are there others? A quick Wikipedia check confirms there are, in fact, dozens.

(Also: A suggestion to all highway patrols: Use “Pronounce ‘i — s — t — h — m — u — s'” as a new field sobriety test.)

All this led me to ponder three questions: (1) accepting that no one is an island, does that provide any useful guidance for business leaders and managers? (2) Might some business leaders and managers be isthmi? If so, what lessons might we all learn from isthmus-style leadership and management? And, (3) might we recognize any other geographically oriented leadership or management styles that might, through similarly preposterous analogizing, provide useful insights for us?

Islands: This is an easy one. Organizationally, islands are silos. The water surrounding them helps prevent invasions from other islands. Also continents, which are just very large islands. The result: Organizational islands and those who lead and manage them have the luxury of avoiding collaboration with other parts of the organization.

This is, quite often, quite lovely for the island’s inhabitants; often less so for the enterprise as a whole, leaving it as an exercise for the reader to find figure out what everything beyond the island corresponds to.

Isthmi: Isthmi are small strips of land that connect two large pieces of land. Or, conversely, they’re narrow strips of land that separate two bodies of water. They facilitate trade and migration between the two pieces of land, while preventing trade and migration between the two bodies of water.

Some managers (and leaders; from here on in we’ll use “manager” for brevity rather than “leaders and managers”) … where was I? Oh yes … some managers are isthmi, connecting two groups that otherwise would behave like organizational islands. Others are isthmi in that they prevent groups that might otherwise collaborate with each other from doing so.

If you see yourself as a connector, make sure you aren’t also acting as a barrier without realizing it.

Peninsulas: Peninsulas are island wannabes. They don’t enjoy human contact and aren’t particularly good at it. Or else they aren’t particularly good at human contact and consequently don’t enjoy it.

Peninsular managers want the authority that comes with their managerial title but view the staff that come with it as irritations at best, sources of bad work they have to fix at worst. As for the managers they report to? They’re necessary evils who really ought to understand they’ll manage best by leaving the peninsula alone as much as humanly possible.

Mountains: Mountains are islands without the surrounding water. That makes a big difference in such matters as erosion and how hard it is to reach the base. Mountain managers like this — sycophants easily reach the base to admire them, without having any chance at all of reaching the top. And, like islands, the only mountains that are truly self-made are the volcanic ones (admittedly pushing the metaphor to the breaking point). All the others are what they are due to tectonic forces beyond their control.

Hills: What can I say? Hills think they’re mountains, when in fact they’re just piles of dirt that aspire to mountainhood but are easily climbed.

Lakes: Hey, we needed some water on the list, and oceans were simply too hard to analogize. Lakes, on the other hand? They’re generally pleasant, nurturing, and in the winter, here in Minnesota, at least, they freeze over, allowing those who like this sort of thing to pitch shelters on the ice, drill holes in it, and go fishing, hoping they don’t catch anything because that would interfere with drinking beer and swapping stories with their buddies.

Lake-like managers are also generally pleasant and nurturing. I’ll leave the rest to you.

For that matter, now that you’ve reached the end of this week’s missive, I’ll leave the point of it to you, too. If you think there is one, that’s what the Comments are for.

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