Why Gold Plating is not Welcome....

Life experiences has always taught us very beautiful lessons, even the ones that I have not studied in my B-School. This has always made me appreciate the immense benefits of learning from unusual sources. This is what my daughter and my wife taught me about 'Gold Plating'.

As usual, it was one of those wonderful late evenings with the family and we were all glued to Barclays premier League match between Manchester United and Liverpool. My wife served me a glass of lassi and after having the same, requested my daughter to leave this in the kitchen sink, as I did not want to take my attention away from the match.

As I instructed my daughter, my wife listened to that and asked my daughter not to keep leave it in the sink, but just on the cooking table. She also told my daughter that, she may not be able to reach the bottom of the sink, so she may break the glass. My daughter went to the kitchen left the glass and came back to the living room and we continued watching the match.

Then, after sometime I heard a sound of glass being shattered, so, had to rush to the kitchen to see if everything is fine. As my daughter and self were going to the kitchen, we heard my wife shouting at my daughter, ' Did I not ask you to keep the glass on the table?'

In the next 5 minutes, things settled down to normalcy. But, when I was just analysing the situation, the only thing that came to my mind was 'Gold Plating'. My wife assumed that my daughter kept the glass on the table, as she had been instructed and kept a big vessel with water in the sink and that had made the glass break. My daughter wanted to do a good job, as she knew that the glass should anyway be kept in the kitchen sink, she stretched a bit and did that, inspite of being asked not to do the same.

Even though my daughter had stretched a bit and completed the task in the way it has to be done, the customer(my wife) was not happy because my daughter did not do, what she was asked to do. So, my daughter, who was thinking that she should be appreciated for what she did, eventually ended up being abused. Are you able to draw parallel to one or more of your customer experiences.

Gold plating is what we call it when the project team does work on the product to add features that the requirements didn’t call for, and that the stakeholder and customer didn’t ask for and don’t need. It’s called “gold plating” because of the tendency a lot of companies have to make a product more expensive by covering it in gold, without actually making any functional changes. (For example, there are plenty of watches and fountain pens you can buy from luxury companies that are identical to their cheaper versions, except that they’re covered in gold.). I shamelessly stole the above definition from Andrew Stellman's blog.

My Experiements with my daughter....

With my weekdays becoming a lot more predictable due to the long travel that I had to do, to reach my office, weekends have become really important for me. And, off late, I see that I am very creative during the weekends with my new experiments.

This week was nothing new and I would say I was certainly at my creative best and unfortunately my seven year old daughter, Atulya, was my guinea pig.
It was life as usual on a Sunday morning, till my mom came to me and asked me to take my daughter for a hair cut and one look, you would agree that the poor little child's haircut was long due. So, I called the nearby 'Green Trends' for an appointment and then got an appointment after 45 minutes.

Now, with my attention being on that, I asked my daughter, "How do you want your hair to be cut?" She said, "Classic Bob Cut". She also said that suited her and also the Hair dresser told that she was beautiful. Then sold my daughter the idea of trying something different and asked her to trust daddy. Reluctantly, the poor child agreed. Mind you, all these are happening without the knowledge of my wife and my mom.

Then I remembered the movie 'Blind Dating' which was screened in Zee Studio a week back. I liked the heroine 'Anjali Jay' in that movie and searched for her pictures and finally got hold of her picture. Then I took a print of the same and told my daughter, that this is how she is going to look and convinced her that it would be great.

Then I took her to the shop and showed the picture of Anjali Jay and asked the lady to do a similar cut. She did do her best and I also added my interpretations and instructions to her and the end result is for you to see.

My daughter was very unhappy and she said that she is not looking like the woman in the picture. The hair dresser did convince her.

Then I told the Hair Dresser that I cannot carry this picture every time, so in case I need to ask for this kind of hair cut to be done, how should I ask? She said, 'Classic Bob Cut'. Luckily, my daughter was not around, when I heard this, Poor Child.

My New Buddy - Nintendo Wii - Could not resist ...

For a long time, I have been a fan of Sony PlayStation and have been spending a lot of time on the same. These games somehow seems to satisfy my ego, when I play alongside Gerrard and Torres in the Liverpool team in FIFA08/09 and also when I see myself in Chicago Bulls Team in NBA Live. The excitement you get, when you are part of the strike force in Call of Duty. So, PS2 and PSP have been my very good personal friends, taking a lot of my time.
When I was thinking that it is time that I should move to PS3, there were worthy competition from Microsoft XBox and Nintendo Wii. Having never been a great fan of Microsoft, my choices were left to Sony PS3 and Nintendo Wii.
Both were awesome, eventhough I was a little partial towards PlayStation due to my loyalty, one demo of Wii bowled me over and I have been planning to buy the same, ever since I played Wii Sports on the Wii Console, way back in July 2008. Having resisted the temptation of being a proud owner of Wii for the last 8 months, I had to give up, unable to resist more.
Now, I own a Wii, the last 4o hours have gone, without me moving away from it.
I love Wii, but, I love PlayStation and PSP too... :-)