Executing Technology Projects

One of our key areas of focus is predictably delivering the value that we need to deliver to the business. One of the general challenges around technology projects is figuring out how to make sure that you will get them done on time and delivering the value that was expected. We focus very heavily on the project management process within technology projects. All of our major projects have assigned project managers who work very closely with our counterparts in the business to define exactly what it is we are trying to do and make sure we are all clear about what we are expecting to deliver. We also make sure that we keep the deliverables organized into manageable blocks that have fairly short timelines associated with them. We generally don't do long term projects in which you don't get anything until the end of the project. We are very focused on figuring out what we can do in a matter of weeks or months to deliver some initial value and then build upon that with follow-on releases to continue adding incremental value. With all of our e-commerce properties, we are very focused on defining clear and manageable sets of functionality that we can deliver, focusing on the ones that have the highest business value and doing them in a way that allows us to deliver that value in a short period of time and then move on to the next deliverable.

For us, serving customers comes down to looking at how our customers want to interact with us, and how we can offer those things in a way that provides the best shopping experience for customers. For example, in our e-commerce businesses, we offer a variety of ways in which you can interact with us. You can work with us over the phone, over email, or even through a live chat solution right from the website. In all of those cases, you are dealing with the same set of call center associates who are servicing phone, fax, and other ordering channels. These associates therefore have access to all of your orders and can help you with any question. Technology enables us to provide customers different avenues to shop with us, and then letting the customer choose which way is more convenient and appropriate for them. We don't push one over the other. Some companies will hide their 800 numbers because they would rather have someone send them an email. We put our number right out there on every page of our website, but we also put icons to email us or chat with us, because some people might prefer to use those mechanisms. We track very closely our handling on all of those things. We make sure we are providing response levels to all those different channels that our customers would expect.

I look at my team as having customers directly, as well, such as our internal customers with whom we partner to bring these things to the market. It is very important to think about what we do in the technology space as providing a service for our own customers, and it is very important that we live up to their expectations, because like anything else, it is very easy for a customer to lose confidence in you if you are unreliable. From our perspective, "delivering reliably" is extremely important because it allows us to be partners in building the business and delivering that value, but to also make sure that the business can count on getting the value that we are expected to deliver at the time it is needed. We can then bake those benefits into our business plans and use them to drive profitability and sales in the business.

We are also very focused on managing and communicating expectations for our team. For example, we publish a scorecard weekly that tells all the people around our business how we are doing on delivering the projects that they are expecting. So we can tell them very quickly whether we are on track or not, what we are planning to spend, and when we are planning to deliver these things. We do that for every single project we have that has any kind of expectation set. We make sure that everyone is one hundred percent aware of what we are doing and how we are doing, and then we measure our entire team on how well they deliver against those expectations. We also distribute the scorecard to everyone on my team, so they know how they are doing as well and what we are telling the business about their projects.