On popcorn, requirements, and missing the point
March 15, 2008
I replenished my popcorn supply today, and my interaction with the checker at the grocery store set me to thinking about how frequently the software requirements that we capture miss the point. And she only asked if I was going to use a hot air popper.
I regularly buy Western Family white popcorn in the two pound bag. The original driver was economy. I am a weekly commuter. I maintain two residences: my permanent family home is in the Rogue Valley in Southern Oregon, my pied-a-terre is a studio apartment over Phil Cusick’s frame shop in downtown Newberg, Oregon, about a half hour drive southwest of Portland. I try to keep the bills for the work side as small as possible, and to favor the home and family side. The financial Stoicism makes me feel virtuous – old school virtus with a modern gender twist – during the week as I knead dough and bake bread, or pick pintos and soak them overnight to have them ready for the crockpot the next morning.
The path of fiscal conservatism led to popcorn. I like salty snacks. But chips – potato, Frito, Dorito, kettle – are expensive. Pretzels are ok, but I tire of them quickly. I found microwave popcorn at WalMart for less than three bucks for a box of fifteen individually wrapped Pop Weaver’s.
And it was ok. But one week even WalMart was too dear. Western Family (northwest store brand) white popcorn to the rescue. $1.65 for a two pound bag, which I find lasts for about as long as a box of Pop Weaver’s.
And the thing is, it is way better. I don’t have a hot air popper in Newberg. I’ve used hot air poppers with bulk popcorn, and they pop great, but the popcorn isn’t very good – it comes out kind of tasteless. I’ve microwaved a lot of popcorn, and it is just ok at best. Popcorn lung and the diacetyl-whatever-is-now-gone notwithstanding, it has a faint chemical aftertaste from the fake butter and whatnot.
Movie theater popcorn, when it is fresh, is pretty good. And the Jiffy Pop I had as a kid was yummy if it was cooked well. If you are as old as me or nearly, you may remember Jiffy Pop: a foil pan filled with popcorn and oil under a cleverly spiral-folded foil cover. You (my first instinct is to use ‘one’ instead of ‘you’ but Donna Meek in high school accused me of never using slang and I’m still seeking her approval decades later) cooked it on top of the stove, and the popping popcorn swelled the foil cover until you had a foil globe full of popcorn. It was easy to burn, and took some technique, so, like the barbeque, it was Dad’s job.
The Western Family white popcorn was a revelation. I don’ t have many pans in my bachelor pad in Newberg. I used an aluminum Dutch oven that we bought at a church rummage sale from the pastor’s wife who lives two doors down from us. I followed the directions on the bag: put a little oil in the pan, put in a few kernels of corn, and heat. When the first kernel pops, add 1/2 cup of corn, cover, and shake regularly until popping subsides. Take it off the heat, season and eat.
Revelation. Roasting the kernels in the hot oil gives the hulls and in turn the whole popped kernel a wonderful toasted nutty flavor. And the Western Family popcorn kernels pop up big and fluffy – the ratio of fluffy white stuff to hull is very good. As opposed to the national brand Jolly Time, both white and yellow varieties, which I’ve tried since, which always seems to pop up meanly.
Once popped, you can flavor the popcorn with the classic butter and salt, or my daughter’s favorite garlic and dill, or whatever – it is a wonderful flavor medium.
Ok, so what does this have to do with software requirements?
Money and time (which equals money) are the low-hanging fruit of requirements. They are easy to quantify. Every company has accountants. Every company has a bottom line.
In the world of popcorn, time and money get you hot air poppers and microwave popcorn.
And I’m sure the engineers at Orville Redenbacher and the like enjoyed rising to the save time and money challenge.
To pop popcorn, you have to get it hot – above a certain minimum heat, below which it won’t pop, but below a certain maximum heat, at which it will burn, and keep it there for a certain length of time. It doesn’t all pop at the same time, which makes the temperature window even smaller for ideal results. When it pops it expands in volume fifty-fold (or somesuch). When it pops it jumps. How can we contain the expansion, or leverage the motion? You can just hear the gears in the popcorn engineering geeks whirring.
But the fundamental requirement for popcorn is that it tastes good, and that it is pleasurable to consume. I am willing to spend ten minutes popping bagged popcorn on the stovetop in a Dutch oven because it tastes good. (The careful reader will point out that I only discovered it because it was cheaper. True, but I don’t believe that fact detracts from the overall power of the popcorn point, which is upon us.)
Here’s the point. When we have a list of requirements we’ve gathered from the business, their prioritization and resolution should not be driven solely or even primarily by short-term cost and technology.
Taking a business process and finding a new automation boundary where we can deploy a gizmo that will save enough money to get the sponsor a tee time with the CFO is the lazy way out.
Taking that same business process and finding a new satisfaction boundary is the more rewarding path, for our employees, customers, and ourselves. The ROI is much harder to measure – but it is there.
Many software projects will deliver microwave or hot air popcorn to the business. And the business just doesn’t know they would really prefer Western Family white popcorn cooked in hot oil and flavored with chipotle, chives, and garlic until they’ve had a taste.
March 16, 2008 at 4:01 pm
So….
You were motivated to reduce costs–that and a vague dissatisfaction with the quality of the popped corn and a hope that you might do no worse and possibly better at a reduced cost.
You were pleased to find that changing vendors and reducing cost did not result in a sacrifice of quality. Just the opposite once you changed your process; the vintage popping process was slightly more labor-intensive (ergo costly) but actually improved customer experience to an undeniable degree.
You were so pleased with the results your brand loyalty was influenced and you were moved to publicize the fact.
Arguably, you are not a typical customer. You did not require education in the benefits of the switch in vendors or a more laborious process. You recognized the lost qualities because you had experienced them in that past and were prepared for your Proustian reawakening. You even knew the lost art of oil-popped corn, including the test kernels.
So the question is, how atypical are you? Is there a market opportunity for a vendor to tap the pent-up demand for oil-popped corn? Is that opportunity sufficiently large for the vendor to risk capital reaching your demographic? Do they have an affordable plan for marketing to your demographic–assuming they can define it and quantify it? It may be that only a specialty market exists for niche players to explore first–you are, after all, admittedly, very price sensitive.
It may be, therefore, that exploration of higher quality designs, processes, products and services will continue to be explored by risk-takers willing to roll the market dice, while bigger players observe and wait until the market declares itself in favor. Some large vendors then pioneer, while others prefer the conservative third-wave settler position. Your risks and opportunities will depend in no small measure upon whether you choose to join company with Lewis and Clark, Leland Stanford or simply pay to ride one of the latter’s trains across territory explored by the former.
Nothing is more frustrating than being an explorer at heart riding a train and trying to convince the conductor to change his schedule because you know for certain there is danger ahead if the present routine is continued. At best you evoke laughter; do it too many times and you get thrown off the train.
As my last three employers have said: “You can’t possibly know that.” Meaning because I could not quantify the dangers and the benefits of the alternatives I proposed, they dismissed first my warnings and then me. Of course what I predicted came to pass–it was never in doubt. One sees patterns in sparse matrices. But companies as they grow become extraverted, ergo reactive. You’ll get a mandate (meaning budget) for quality the day the lack of it shows up clearly in successive quarterly statements. Unless you believe you are correct and go find or start a Corps of Exploration. And you know that they sometimes suffer high attrition and don’t always reach the coast—let alone find their way back to tell about it.
March 16, 2008 at 10:44 pm
So to avoid Cassandra’s fate, it seems we either need to be the person signing the checks – a model which worked well for you, as I recall – or be the trusted technical confidant of the person signing the checks.
If we are neither, are we out of options? Maybe not.
We could try to prove the ROI from our sparse array of information. But as I mentioned in my posting On the true nature of business intelligence that requires a level of sophistication that is difficult, read expensive, to provide.
Ironically it is well-known to be very difficult to prove the ROI of just the kinds of forecasting tools we would need to demonstrate the ROI of our best ideas – largely because, as you said, human brains are fantastic pattern recognition engines, and it is hard to beat their value proposition when faced with a sparse array of data.
So here is a product idea. It may already exist, but I have not seen a Delphi forecasting capability in the new generation of collaboration tools.
Remember that a Delphi forecast is a formal workflow-based approach designed to help a group of experts arrive at a common forecast. It avoids the problems of single expert forecasts – bias, real or perceived, and a lack of authority with the check-signer – and the problems of interpersonal group forecasts – bad forecasts resulting from group dynamics: dominance, persuasiveness, sex.
Essentially, a Delphi forecast consists of a series of questionaire-response-refinement cycles, where a questionaire is distributed to the group, and the answers are collected and used as inputs to improve and focus the next one. The cycle continues until the result has stabilized.
Back before Movie Gallery came in and bankrupted them, Hollywood Entertainment used a modified Delphi forecast to predict the performance of new videos that had done over 10 million box office. Statistical forecasting methods and tools based on historical titles with similar attributes were used (including some I architected or helped architect while working there as a contractor then an FTE) to ’seed’ the forecast. But the final process was a sort of Delphi forecast where a standing panel of experts weighed in in a voting cycle.
It would be interesting to create and position a Delphi collaboration technology solution, and then to see what weight an impaneled Delphi team whose forecasts where formally faciliated by the collaboration technology might have where a lone pioneer’s voice might fail.
It turns out that at the real Delphi, hallucinogenic fumes were seeping out of the ground. The prognostications of the Oracle were just the stoned ramblings of someone with a good buzz on. If we knew the True History of Steve and The Woz, we might find a modern variation on a classic theme.
June 4, 2008 at 6:04 pm
Interesting blog ya got here, Max. Mmmm…popcorn. I tried Jiffy pop not so long ago at the beach, and I burned it. Indeed, it is an art form.
I remembered it from childhood though. Hey, your email bounced back to me, so if you want the 1970’s humorous email forward of the day, shoot me an email and I will try it again.
-L
November 1, 2008 at 11:41 am
It’s only Stumptown Hair Bender and the remnants of a cold seeping into my brain this morning, but as I looked back at your response I find myself trying to correlate Delphi System with my other challenge to you today, to model me a net-penguin or a web-whale–an intelligence well-suited to multi-dimensional life in the sensory rich internet sea.
July 8, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Here’s a mashup of a couple of your ruminations: Any thoughts on combining Delphi Forecasting techniques with Roadmapping exercises?
July 11, 2009 at 9:31 am
Sounds workable. There aren’t really any formal models for generating roadmaps from corporate history, so all roadmaps now are likely created by variations on the ‘Larry method’ – Larry goes off somewhere and makes the roadmap. A Delphi forecast would not only bring more rigor to the approach, arguable resulting in consistently better roadmaps, it would also introduce an opportunity to formalize IT- business alignment.
While, as I said in a comment above, I have not seen any Delphi tools in Sharepoint or similar collaboration technology, that does not mean they don’t exist or could not be readily created.
Interesting mashup.