Ernie and Bert have issues. Because Ernie and Bert are archetypes. They represent the Yin and Yang of the Human condition.
It is reasonable to expect that anyone reading this is human.
In this video, Ernie is a standard production unit. At times he is painting (development), other times he is reassuring Bert that the product will be done on time and to spec (product manager or sales), at one point he presents the finished product for use (installation or delivery).
Bert goes through some stages in his position as the customer: thanking Ernie for his services, then becoming antsy when the schedule might overrun, then frustrated when the product is defective.
As Bert goes through these stages, he places pressure on the production unit. When the delivery of the defective unit is made however, the customer’s understandably righteous indignation ”ERNIE! THAT DOESN’T LOOK ANYTHING LIKE ME!!!!” is met with surprise by production “It doesn’t, Bert?”
Simon Marcus is not Bert
Development built a product for their idea of Bert, and not the actual Bert. “I must say that it looks exactly like you Bert, I did a fantastic job,” Ernie says on delivery.
(Apparently, they thought Bert was my good friend Simon Marcus…who looks a lot like the picture on the right).
Not showing the product to the client while it was in production coupled with the high cost of change leads to the only conclusion – production must physically change the client to conform to the product. In this case, turning Bert the Muppet into Simon the COO.
This radical alteration of Bert is funny and it even makes adults laugh, but we do it all the time in business. We give people what they don’t want and then we spend money in support or training or advertising to counteract our shoddy or unthoughtful work. This is what John Seddon calls “failure demand” – the spending of resources we engage in to make up for the failures we build in to our own products.
When we build shoddy or unthoughtful products, they cost us – in money, time, and consumer good will.
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Simon doesn’t look anything like post-production Bert! He doesn’t have curly hair!
Seriously though, perfect example of failure demand. In a recent engagement I was told that we could never deliver our product continuously because “our users are not sophisticated enough to use the product we deliver infrequently. It takes us weeks to train the users to use the product every time we release a major revision!” My suggestion that we might refocus our efforts to creating a product that was intuitively usable to our paying customers was met with blank stares of disbelief. The belief that “unsophisticated users” will /never/ be able to use /any/ product without extensive training was unshakable.
Sometimes you can’t put the fake-beard folks out of business.
Thanks for this, I understand Failure Demand a lot better now. Muppets are awesome, great series BTW.
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