Pave Over the Lines

A little over 5 years ago and the night before chairing a meeting to kick off an important project, I was listening to Don Jackson's radio program, Lovers & Other Strangers, on 98.1 CHFI.

He told a story that impressed me so much, I used it in the meeting the next day to impress on the programmers and managers present the importance of meeting customer needs and expectations.

We were starting to build a secure website that automobile dealers could use to manage their auto inventories and enter payment transactions. This system was going to replace a fully paper-based process where dealers had to hand-write 17 digit serial numbers on a form for every one of their payment transactions. These transactions were then keyed into the system, twice by Bank keytapers and the error rate was about 20%.

In designing the website, we didn't go out to see systems that had been built by other banks. Instead, we held sessions with our clients who told us exactly what they wanted and how they wanted to use it. After we came up with a prototype, again we took it out to our focus groups of users and they validated what we had designed. Of course, when they saw it and used it, they came back with many more improvements, which we were able to either build in or plan for the next release.

Here then is the story that inspired our systems development team...

A general contractor was taking a moment to view the entire layout of a cluster of office buildings that he was building in downtown Toronto. His perch was on the 25th floor of one of the unfinished buildings and his view was into the the central common area between the buildings. He was visualizing the complex as a finished structure and was planning the next important steps to be taken. The complex was about two months away from completion.

After a few minutes, he got on the 2-way radio and asked that the landscaping contractor join him on the 25th floor. When he arrived, the general contactor greeted him and asked him to look down on the common area and tell him how he planned to lay out the paved pathways that would connect the buildings.

The landscaping contractor launched into a detailed description of the standard methods they always used to determine the best routes for these pathways to be laid out based on surveys and specs from other complexes and research and opinion polls and a miriad of other resources he had at his disposal.

The general contractor stopped him in mid-sentence and said "Don't do any work, except to lay sod over the entire common area before the buildings open. Leave the pathways for exactly two months after the buildings are populated. Then join me again here in this office and I'll show you how the pathways will be laid out."

The landscaping contractor left the building muttering about the general contractor and his curious request, but he came back exactly two months after the buildings opened.

Back on the 25th floor, the general contractor asked him to look out the window on the common area and tell him what he saw. To his surprise, he saw perfect lines that connected all of the buildings, worn into the grass by workers in the buildings. Large round tramped down areas connected by lines corresponded with where office staff congegated to visit and meet others. There were even lines going out of the common area around each building and out onto the street.

The general contractor simply said "Now pave over the lines."

If you are building a product, service or system for customers, do not sit in your office and design what you think they want. Go to your customer's workplace, sit down with them and their users and start to make notes on a clean sheet of paper. The most important thing you can do is to listen to what your client wants. They know their business best and what will help them perform.

Bottom line...after 9 months development and testing, our system rolled out over 3 months to 100% of eligible dealers and received rave reviews from them. They knew we had transferred our work to them but the process was so easy they were willing to do the work. The system design also won a technical award. And the project came in on time and under budget. We had definitely paved over the lines.