Taking customer risks fable

September 19, 2008 by Artem

Disclaimer: All events and situations are imaginary. Any coincidence with reality is accidental.

Picture courtesy of law_keven@Flickr

Once upon a time there was a web development shop. One day a customer from a mobile phone and laptop company called Nokapple came to the shop asking to build a web site for selling music. The project was supposed to change the whole market and appealed to the company much, the team never worked on that big project, but had relevant experience and agreed.

The development started actively and everything was going more or less smoothly. The customer's requirements did change during the course of the project, but the team managed to cope with that and was still targeting the original release date. Customer was so happy to see the evolving project that two months before the release date he decided to change his business plan and start targeting not only US market, but to go internationally.

Unfortunately the original plan was to have a US-only service and the team never considered the non-latin alphabets. In particular their text processing routines were never tested with the multibyte characters and there were no testers who were able to verify the Chinese or Japanese versions. Under the deadline pressure the team decided to quick-hack the routines and hire local Chinese students for testing. The hard work was not wasted and the system was done on time. The US launch went smoothly and competitor shares went down.

One week later Nokapple started offering the service in Asia. The next day the system text processing and sorting modules clinched trying to process the user comments and the US-based customers suddenly noticed a lot of Chinese songs in their favorite lists and it became impossible to search for the songs by Metallica and Madonna. Tabloids thrashed the company.

Two months later the team was able to fix all the glitches, but Nokapple had to return a lot of monthly payments, lost many existing and potential customer. The brand suffered greatly and the competitors got chance to enter the market actively looking for the competitive solutions. A stunning success turned into almost a failure. The web development shop was sued and might need to go bankrupt.

The moral

Risks are rarely if ever on one side of the project. There always are uncertainties that require trade-offs to be made by the customer. Customer wouldn't ever want to know how your modules handle the string data, but he has to be aware of the risks and he has to make the decision on whether he wants to pay for eliminating some of them.

Permalink