Fact: small technical implementations can sometimes have big perceived or real business benefits for clients…
White Wall Web recently worked with RE/MAX of Southern Africa to deliver a new digital initiative which “allows sales associates with profiles or accounts on major social networking sites (such as Facebook or MySpace) to add, manage and organise property listings through social bookmarking.” (Read more about this here)
This sounds exceptional from a business value perspective and has generated notable press coverage, but technically, this is one of the simplest implementations we have completed on behalf of RE/MAX of Southern Africa in the entire 5 years of working with them. This got me seriously thinking about maximizing business value when consulting…
Business Value, Complexity and Effort
When doing project work at WWW, we follow the SCRUM process. Three important metrics considered in the planning process are “business value,” “complexity” and “effort.”
Business Value is all about the value a piece of functionality will create in positioning a business to meet it’s organizational objectives.
Complexity is about how complex a piece of functionality is to produce.
Effort is about how long a piece of functionality will take to produce.
Complexity and Effort differ in that two tasks may take the same amount of time (effort) but require a far more skilled person to do the one than the other (complexity). Consider the difference between watching a 2 hour movie vs. conducting a 2 hour heart surgery.
Clients are happy when…
…they maximise business value while minimizing costs. Since both effort (time = money) and complexity (high skill = money) add cost.
Consultant’s Gold
As a consultant/solution provider you have struck gold when you find ways to maximize business value while keeping effort and complexity at a necessary low.
Fight the urge to use all your super powers all the time
As consultants/solutions providers (in any field) we have a great toolset of awesome super-powers. The urge is to use them all, all the time. We are conditioned to think “It’s not good enough to add some simple social-media-bookmarking-tool-bar to a website as a professional and respectable solution.” Surely that can’t be of great value? What will my peers say? How could I possibly do that and claim I have done something noteworthy/worthwhile?
It’s all about what you value
What we value most dictates what we will consider to be most commendable. For example, if you value a healthy family life, you will think that an 80 hour work week is excessive and stupid, but if you value hard work and maximum wealth creation, you will think that a 40 hour work week is lazy and stupid.
This issue is actually rooted in the same. As a consultant/solutions provider, if you value creating maximum business success for the clients you serve, your focus will be on business value creation at the lowest possible cost. If you value the technical implementation of a solution, that will be what you consider most commendable.
It’s also about professional maturity
A mature professional appreciates and celebrates the creation of business value.
It is immature to elevate technical implementation above business value creation because in reality, technical implementation is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself.
The Web Dev Community
As an international and local community, I think we are getting better at this, but we still have a way to go. What I mean is, I recall 3-4 years ago, techie forums (for example) being very heavy on the actual tech used in producing solutions. Some loud-mouths “out there” would lambaste others in the community for their technical implementations (even often when the resultant business value created was high, despite not-too-amazing tech)
As a community of practitioners, we need to continue create a new peer pressure: maximize business value, keep complexity and effort at a necessary minimum.
A developer/technician/consultant who gets this right is a true professional in my view.
In previous posts we have discussed the importance of tweaking your website’s meta descriptions and meta tags in order to optimise your site. Although doing this is very important, prioritising links on your site is something that needs to be checked at least once to ensure that your site is ranking as highly as it deserves to.
