Mc Outsourcing

I read recently in the New York Times that Mc Donald’s has moved some of their drive-up window order taking to centralized call centers in an effort to improve service and cut costs.

While you probably won’t might not be ordering Big Macs from customer service reps in New Delhi or the Philippines anytime soon,orders from some customers in Hawaii,Oregon,Maryland (and others places I’ve forgotten) are traveling as far as California before being routed back to computers inside the local restaurants. The article says this new process is designed to speed up order taking and fulfillment. Hmmmm.

Scope Creep

If the writing here seems spotty or few and far between lately,it’s likely due to scope creep. Also known as ‘Give an inch,take a mile’ or ‘Why can’t I say no?’

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term,scope creep is those little extras that seem to sneak into projects (of any size) that manage to make them one or two or more sizes larger than originally intended. I’m sure it has a much more technical definition,but I think that breaks it down just fine for my purposes.

I’ve been working seven days a week lately on a number of projects. As usual,there is work work (what I consider my full time job) and within that there are “volunteer” projects. When I say volunteer,I mean a combination of being a true volunteer and a conscript.

I was asked to put together a registration web site for Take Your Kids to Work Day which somehow. Originally it was supposed to record whether employees were bringing their children or not and how many. Somehow that’s mushroomed into allowing employees to register each of their children for different sessions,closing these sessions when maximum occupancy is reached,and since some sessions are different lengths,disallowing employees from registering children in overlapping sessions. It will also dump registrants into an Excel sheet so that administrators can print out agendas for each employee’s children.

The Corporate Challenge logo is also running into multiple iterations because the different groups represented all want their names to appear first. Hopefully all the time I’ve spent on that will be coming to an end soon and a consesus will be reached.

I’ve also had a bunch of freelance work lately (which is a situation I hope I never complain about) and I’m getting ready for a much needed vacation.

Stay tuned over the next two weeks for those announcements. One will be the unveiling of the Corporate Challenge logo and the other will be a new web site.

Corporate Challenge

I’m pleased to announce that this year I’′ll be designing the shirt worn by the local Citigroup companies in the JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge. This includes local offices of The Student Loan Corporation,Citibank,and Solomon Smith Barney (my apologies if I forgot any group). Check back for an unveiling of the design after final approval by the powers that be.

Big News!

Check back for at least two major announcements coming with the next few days. Details need to be finalized but I have some great news coming! Stay tuned…

They’ll Always Win

As part of a promotion,I was enrolled in something called a Card Protector Benefit after signing up for a new credit card. The idea is that a percentage of your monthly balance is paid back into a fund like an insurance policy in case you’re ever in a situation where you can’t pay your monthly bill.

I try not to use my card too often and I don’t anticipate losing my job so I wasn’t totally excited about this program. But people get busy and several months went by before I called to cancel it. Naturally the woman on the phone tried to convince me not to leave the program by informing me of its other benefits. It turns out that they pay out for more than just job loss. They pay out for other life changing events such as purchasing a new home,having a child,graduating from college,things like that.

Having purchased a home a little while ago,she convinced me to stick it out at least until I received what I had coming to me for that event. Turns out that’s two months of bill payment (courtesy of the card company) and a refund of those two months of the program fee.

I didn’t intend to give it too much more thought until I had received those benefits (and it was time to cancel again) but for some reason I’ve been thinking about it this morning.

This whole concept is genius for many reasons. Like insurance,the company bets that not everyone they collect from will use the benefits so they make money. They still win when you collect because you’re providing them with valuable personal data that would otherwise be unavailable to them.

For instance,I collected my benefit because I purchased a new home. Since most people don’t purchase homes on credit cards,whether I rent or own would be information they wouldn’t know unless they asked. I’m voluntarily providing them with this information. It just so happens that this credit card company also provides many other services such as mortgages,student loans,auto financing,etc. Now that they know I own a home,how long do you think it will take before I’m bombarded by marketing material asking me to consider refinancing or describing home equity products?

Read This

I find this person’s writing and insight so spot on that I would consider going to work for them immediately if:

1. I lived in Silicon Valley
2. I knew who this person was
3. I knew where this person worked

Numbers 2 and 3 are relatively easily solved with a little detective work but it’s just not worth it considering number 1. So for now I think I’ll simply continue to enjoy his writing.

Visit the link above to soak in some ideas on how decisions are made and ideas created. I find I work much the same way. Maybe that’s why I enjoy his articles so much.

Top 10

The Student Loan Corporation has a new CIO. One of the programs she has carried over from her work at Citigroup is the Top 10 program. Each month the organization honors the top performers in each department.

I am pleased to announce that this past Friday,my boss presented me with the Top 10 award for January after only 8 weeks in my position. Ok,they’re a little behind but that’s not the point. It’s quite an honor to be chosen out of a department of 60 people whose work I respect. It’s also nice to know that my work is having an impact and being noticed.

• I could be your top performer. Download my resume.

Superhero

Listening to NPR the other day. Diane Rehm was talking to a young woman with a learning disability. She was saying how she had gone to schools specifically tailored for LDs all her life but since no one was going to cut her any slack in the real world,she decided to go to a non-LD college so she’d get used to it. Diane asked her if she liked it. She said yes but she wasn’t sure if she was going to stay. She wasn’t sure what career she wanted to have when she grew up but she knew she wanted to be a super hero. A super hero. They never said what college it was but I’m pretty sure they don’t have a super hero program there.

I want to be a superhero too. I want to be a super hero to my family. I want to be a super hero to my friends. I want to be a super hero to my coworkers and clients. Is that too much to ask?

Luckily the two Andys (Budd and Clarke) have me covered in the web design department with their SXSW presentation,How to be a Web Design Superhero.

Microsoft Expression

Our intranet has tons of documents published by a dozen or so different business groups. A good portion of those documents are web pages that have been thrown together assembled in FrontPage and published. Maintenance of those documents fall on the webmaster so when necessary,I need to go in and update them accordingly. This is a terrible,terrible job.

FrontPage writes some of the most awful code I’ve ever seen in my entire life. It even writes some code I’ve never seen in my entire life,like the <big> tag. Where did that come from? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve only ever seen it in FrontPage code.

The FrontPag- generated documents are usually so bloated that I can’t even do a simple find on the text I’m looking to modify because it’s broken up by nested or empty tags. If just looking at the code doesn’t immediately suck out my will to live and send me into sinking depression,I’ll usually try to clean it up and simplify. It’s so bad that the other day I literally replaced about 900 lines of HTML (yes,HTML) with about 100 lines of semantic,standards-based XHTML and CSS. Yeah me!

That’s why it makes me happy to introduce Expression,the new FrontPage from Microsoft. That’s right,I’ve read that FrontPage is being replaced by Expression which supposedly writes valid Strict and Transitional HTML and XHTML,has better support for CSS,and will even validate accessibility if you so desire (and you should).

IE7 CSS Support and Float Clearing

I’ve heard that the beta of Internet Explorer 7 has finally been released,so now is the time for developers to step up testing of their work to make sure everything is copacetic.

The good news is that IE will now support transparent PNGs. The bad news (among other things) is that it now parses the comment filter /**/ that is commonly used to hide styles from its older siblings.

I’ve also heard that IE7 isn’t supporting the :after pseudo-element which developers commonly use to clear floats,although that didn’t immediately jump out at me on developer’s checklist provided by Microsoft. Take a look and see what you need to get your sites ready for IE7.