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“There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
The saying goes that “ideas are cheap, but failure can be expensive.” Each idea we implement, whether it succeeds or fails, has hidden costs which we often don’t consider. You’re aware of the obvious costs such as research, design and development. But have you considered the costs of implementation, change management and the ongoing costs? These hidden costs may be contributing to your idea not being fully used by your customer.
Implementation costs
Your feature is turned on by default and the customer doesn’t need to do anything, right? Wrong. Every idea needs to be checked for security, privacy, and compliance issues. IT needs to be trained and ready to support your idea. Their own support teams need to be ready for the inevitable questions that come their way.
In DevOps, there’s a concept of planned and unplanned work. According to a study by PagerDuty, “70% or more technology staff are negatively impacted by unplanned work in three or more different ways, including heightened stress and anxiety, reduced work-life balance, and less time to focus on important work.” Organizations classify an idea we release without enough notification, supporting content or controls as unplanned work.
All of this has a cost to the customer. Yes, that puppy may be “free,” but there’s a lifetime of cost associated with it.
How might you do a better job of enabling the customer to successfully implement your idea?
Change Management Costs
Although we like to think our idea is so beautifully designed and easy to use that people will just start using it straightaway, that usually isn’t the case. Users want to know:
- Your idea exists – One of the biggest challenges our customers face is keeping up with the volume of changes in our services. Many great ideas get lost in the deluge of ideas pushed to customers daily.
- What does your idea do – What does your idea do for them? And how does it make their life easier?
- Why your idea? – How is your idea better than what they do now? Why should they go through the pain of learning a new tool or creating a new habit?
All of this requires communication, content, persuasion, training, coaching and support. This has a cost in terms of time, and the customer carries this burden.
How might you enable your customer to sell your idea to their users, and train and educate them?
Ongoing Costs
While your idea is in production, there will be support, maintenance, integration, training, and localization costs both to us and the customer.
Updating an idea to try and drive usage results in more implementation and change management costs for the customer.
While you may have moved on to a new project, your idea will remain – incurring costs.
How might you help reduce the ongoing costs of your idea?
Lost Opportunity Cost
A lost opportunity cost is the time you spent on one idea that you could have spent doing something else. Examples are:
- Working on a problem that helps customers achieve more
- Salespeople resolving issues with your idea instead of selling
- IT having to deal with consequences of your idea instead of delivering value to their organization
How might you work with your customer to ensure you’re solving a problem they care about?
Cost of Reputation
Any idea that fails will have a negative impact both on your employer and you – especially if you could have avoided it. It’s further compounded if the customer also feels the pain, for example with an outage or security issue, or resistance from users.
Your idea may not look so cheap now! Even with a successful idea, the value received by the customer must be higher not only than their current pain, but also the cost of implementing the change (both technical and behavioral) That’s a high bar to meet.
For the customer, Value = Gain – (purchase cost + (implementation + change + ongoing))
Even a promising idea that’s successfully executed and well received will have a cost, but there’ll be a positive return on investment for the customer. It will be worth the effort.
But if the value of an innovative idea, even a successfully implemented one, is less or equal to the true cost (for both the customer and the user), then your idea is likely to fail.
In a future article, we’ll look at why our ideas may fail.
How do these thoughts affect your approach to new ideas? What are ways you help customers implement new technologies more smoothly (with less cost)? Tweet us your thoughts at @MicrosoftRI or follow us on Facebook and join the conversation.
John Westworth is a Design Researcher in the Office Design and Research team. He is passionate about providing leadership to help companies implement change and manage transformation to use new technologies that impact how they work. Check out John’s other blog articles, “A responsible approach to innovation,” and “Conflict: The missing ingredient and biggest test of a growth mindset.“