Final deliverables are like buildings.
A colleague, Mark Shekoyan, brought in Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn" to work today. I haven't read the book in years, but it reminded me about a conversation we've been having at Jump.
We're consultants. We aren't ultimately responsible to turn our work into action, most of the time. Especially since our work tends to be more conceptual and strategic, and less at the end stages of the product development cycle.
When we hand off deliverables to the clients, the ultimately change. Hopefully we've done a good job along the way of collaborating with them, so that what we give them is already actionable within their organization. But politics interfere. People cycle on to new positions. New people join teams. Management priorities shift. By the time a project is truly finished (if you can ever say it is), the work in a "final deliverable" has shifted incredibly. The bones of the thinking are there. But a lot of how it looks has changed.
Which brings me back to Stewart Brand. It's stupid to get too wrapped up in what we hand off versus what eventually happens to the work. Final deliverables learn too. What's important is that they're built to learn. That we get what our clients are looking for, and how things might change. That we're not creating a structure that, if you tear down one wall, the whole building collapses.
Or are we just giving them a foundation that they can build on? (Katherine Wakid points out...)
I'm a stereotype.
I'm currently in Seattle. Attending a DMI seminar on Integrating Strategy into the Design Process, or something. Brian, Alison, and baby girl Anna aren't in town, so I was left to dinner on my own.
So I went to Wild Ginger. I'd been there a year ago with Dan, and it's tasty mmmm.
At 7:30 pm I found myself super content. I had a ginger martini (just infused vodka, not sweet, thank god) in one hand and a short rib satay in another. And, on my brand new iPhone, I was watching This American Life, the TV show. Cocktail + tasty mmmm food + TAL = perfect.
I had on my glasses. Cute Miz Mooz red shoes. My burnt orange dress, complete with cleavage. My cute Bloom bag. I'm sure I'm a stereotype. Intellectual hipster wannabe? Drunk designerly girl? Lonesome young business traveler?
Unclear. But I enjoyed myself.
iPhone therefor I wanna be
In a move I did not anticipate, I bought an iPhone. The issues were these:
- My contract with att (formerly Cingular) was up. I was in the market.
- My razr had started making an irritating buzzing noise in the background, mostly when I was home, but not necessarily.
- I have no land line.
- I have no cable.
- I have no internet at home. Occasionally I can poach my neighbor's wifi, which, btw, I've talked to him about. It's ok with him.
So, I have no internet. My phone doesn't work so good. And my contract is up. Then, last week, they lowered the cost on the iPhone. Dan convinced me to go to the att store.
I looked at other phones, I swear. Contemplated the blackberry pearl, for example. There's this nice Nokia flip phone, that, while boxy, is a Nokia, has a 2Mpxl camera, and seems nice.
But the iPhone blew the competition out of the water. And really, for $12 more a month (removing various add ons to my plan), I could get internet! On my phone, sure, but also through wireless in most everywhere (it seems like there's always an open wifi). I was sold.
I bought one. I now own an iPhone.
Here's where the problem comes in. I had a razr. I wanted my contacts moved to my new phone. Wisely (as it will be shown), Apple didn't trust att with the service part of the equation. Instead, it uses iTunes (had to upgrade) to register your phone. You do it yourself, through a user experience Apple controls. Ok, fine by me. But what about my contacts?
The iPhone doesn't take a sim card. No go on just the easy transfer of numbers. While I had a usb connector to my phone (thanks, dan), the shareware I could find (thanks, dan) which required another piece of software to open (thanks, dan), didn't work. So Dan (thanks, dan) trucked back to the store, waited in line, and paid $15 for them to put a .pbb file with my contacts onto a flashdrive, and brought it back home. They claimed at the store all I had to do was import it into Outlook. FYI, Outlook doesn't recognize .pbb files. In the depths of the att online support, Dan found (thanks, dan) the help required. First, download a zip file. Next, open the zip. Next, run the .exe. Which throws an error.
At this point, I'm basically in tears. I hate techonology. Technologevil. And my wonderful $300 iPhone experience is definitely ruined. Suffice to say, after updating my Windows .NET (thanks, dan) and reinstalling my .exe, I exported my contacts into a format for Outlook, imported them into Outlook, realized the format they were in sucked, explorted them from Outlook into .xls, spent 3 hours cleaning up the file, reimported them into Outlook, spent 1/2 hour cleaning up my Outlook contacts, hooked up my iPhone and synched, and, at last, have my contacts onto my computer.
At least 6 hours later. If not 8. I may have well just put them in by hand.
So, who failed me? Att, for sure. They did not give me any useful (instead, harmful) service to migrate from my razr to my iPhone. Apple did, too. Because they took away the migration from att, removed them from the loop and therefore the responsibility, and didn't supply the service instead. I feel like Motorola did, by not giving me software to manage my contacts on my computer.
The list goes on. But it comes down to a bottom line. I almost returned my iPhone. I do not feel fondly towards my iPhone experience. It took me most of my Sunday to migrate over. And I'm bitter. Apple may have been trying to create a good customer experience for me by controlling all aspects of registering my phone. But by taking the ball out of att's court, and not up tepping fully to the reponsibilities of migration, Apple failed.
Boo Apple.
