I never thought I’d say it – major hotel chains can learn something from the airlines!

I just finished a stay in Chicago at one of the “premium” brands of one of the top two hotel chains.

The hotel charged $14.95 per day for Internet access plus $2.17 in taxes.  Other than Internet access, the only other benefit of paying this fee was free local phone calls – with most travelers using their cell phones, this seems of marginal value. Let’s put this in perspective – in most large cities, you can get monthly residential high-speed Internet access for double or at most triple this price!  Charging for Internet access made economic sense a decade or two ago when it was not ubiquitous however now, it is equivalent to charging for the use of the TV.

What makes this interesting is that these same hotel chains provide free Internet access at their “economy” brands.  As a frequent traveler, the level of service and amenities I benefited from at the premium brand were equivalent to what I would have enjoyed at a discount brand.

Businesses usually fleece customers who purchase bare bones services, but are quick to pamper those that are willing to pay more for premium service.

The airlines are perfect examples of this – fly economy class and you will pay for headphones, drinks and checked in luggage. Fly business class and the same add on’s are included in the cost of your ticket.  In addition, achieving a status threshold with most airline loyalty programs usually results in fees being waived for check in luggage, access to lounges and similar add on’s.

The major hotel chains need to follow the lead of the airlines – eliminate fees for Internet access at their premium brands or at minimum drop them for customers that have achieved a minimal (e.g. Silver) status level within their loyalty programs.

Evaluate frequently & terminate fast – project selection for the new decade

If your organization has a consistent project intake & selection process, kudos to you.  But if your intake process happens only once a year, is mostly focused on hard dollar consuming or capital-oriented projects or takes more than two weeks to complete, my condolences.

Let’s look at each of these practices in turn:

1. Annual project selection: I am a strong proponent for strategic planning and the need for organizations to try to establish a medium-long term initiatives plan that looks beyond the next quarter but you cannot expect that projects identified at the beginning of your fiscal year will still all be valuable and prioritized appropriately by the third or fourth quarter of that year.   The frequency of portfolio reviews needs to be tuned to how often reasonable project requests are submitted.

2. Don’t purely focus on hard-dollar or capital-intensive projects.  In nearly all services organizations and a significant percentage of product organizations, resource availability is a primary bottleneck to throughput and a critical source of project schedule risk.  Given this, your project selection process needs to consider all projects especially those that consume internal resources.  You might be better off initiating a project that costs money, but can be mostly delivered using external resources (assuming of course, this project will deliver real business value!) instead of one that costs little but consumes critical internal resources.

3. If your project selection process takes more than two weeks to complete from the moment that reasonable project requests have been submitted, you are encouraging the genesis of “stealth” projects.  In addition, since most strategic projects have time sensitivity, the longer your governance committees spin their wheels in making decisions, the greater the likelihood that the market viability or business benefits of these projects will be reduced.  I am not advocating impulsive decision making – what I am recommending is a combination of a consistent, objective approach to evaluate projects in a rapid fashion, combined with a stage gate process that is able to kill off poorly performing or low value projects in a timely manner.

Traditional approaches to project intake & selection are losing their value unless you happen to be work for a company that operates as a monopoly (or at worse a very limited oligopoly).  Of course, even a monopoly situation won’t help if the market for your products or services is shrinking.

Feature bloat in Project is a Micro(soft) symptom of a Macro issue

If you have railed at the ballooning costs, system resource requirements and feature overload in new versions of Microsoft Project or other desktop productivity applications, this article may strike a chord.

Having worked for a few software companies, I know very well how much blood, sweat and tears goes into each new product release – from a product development perspective, as well as from the sales, marketing, support and implementation areas.  Most software companies don’t produce new releases just for the sake of doing so, they, like most other organizations are being driven by consumer pressure.

This got me thinking about this problem – 95% of users will leverage less than 10% of the capabilities of any current commercial software product.  This same bastardization of the Pareto principle could be applied to popular media and information distribution – most TV viewers watch less than 10% of the TV channels that they subscribe to, and there are very few people that can claim to read each and every article of the newspapers or magazines they purchase.

The idea that “new” or “more” is better is a pox on our society – it drives public companies to fore go strategic planning in favor of attempting to exceed market expectations on a quarter-by-quarter basis.  It forces TV networks and movie production houses to churn out content in the hopes of finding a hit, and causes Tweeters, Bloggers and traditional authors to sacrifice insightful prose for volume just to be able to retain the mind share of their audience.

Finally, it causes (most) software companies to bypass true innovation and high quality practices to instead seek short term “heat” through the release of more and more features that few people will truly benefit from.

Patience is a virtue that is in danger of being lost – we expect companies to generate new products at a faster pace than can be done in a quality fashion, and with greater frequency than our ability to absorb change.  We implore artists to produce innovative material but then are unwilling to give all but the most successful of them the time it takes to be truly creative.

Our ability to focus and squeeze out the maximum value of the things we purchase is decreasing and the trend is not changing with new generations – we may have been content at a younger age with one or two significant gifts for our birthdays but our children are expecting an order of magnitude more, and cast aside toys that have been played with less than a handful of times.

As Pogo said “We have met the enemy and he is us”