I flipped my pizza table — part 1
Mom, I’m about to order some pizza, want anything?
I got so hungry while working on a presentation of a project for quite several hours. Around 45 minutes later of waiting for the order, my pizza arrived. I opened up the box to grab the very first bite and found that the “pizza table”, also known as pizza saver, remained upside-down. I grabbed it off my way, wanting to throw it away until my mom said “Just so you know, I collect the pizza tables”. That thing was handed to her and I got back to work with only a handful of pizza pieces.
….About 1 hour later,
Feeling slightly hungry again, I walked to the dining table to find some snack to munch on and had to be surprised by seeing my mom using the upside-down pizza saver as a cellphone holder, watching her Korean series on Netflix…
So, who actually invented this thing? I did not wait to google it…It was Carmela Vitale, from New York, who had the “package saver” officially patented in 1985. This saver serves its purpose to prevent the lid of cardboard box from collapsing by the heat upon the food.
My mom, my role-model hoarder
I am sure every mom has this instinct oozing off their motherhood in some way. My mom likes to hoard things up even if they are extremely old and almost useless but she would still find a way to utilize them based on the “4 R’s” principle — reduce, reuse, recycle, recover. I mean she is not even aware of the principle at all but as I previously told you, every mom has it come naturally. I cannot really say that she is a planet savior but for sure she was a “me saver”; her 4 R’s enlightened me and propped up my project.
How I flipped my pizza saver
I was working on a project about re-building up a standard Content Management System platform, designed to be globally used by different entities or partnered companies located around the world. This CMS platform is customizable to be just anything such as e-commerce site, showcase site, getting-to-know-your-company site, headhunting site etc. — All up to the requirement.
Thanks to my mom, the pizza saver and whoever initially defined the 4 R’s and has made it globally well-known , these powerful 4 R’s were what I could use to jigsaw up the whole things to the idea of re-surfacing the software product as a solution to sell — and that’s what a software project management guy like me would want on his presentation to propose to the top management team:D.
After projecting the whole idea to my boss, we had certain things to work on here:
1.Reuse — the coding inside the existing customized CMS platform is what we were going to maintain and sell as a solution in cost-friendly perspective, making it a standard CMS platform for the identity/face of our partnered entities globally and rename a common name to it.
2.Reduce — applying the “7 wastes” concept (aka 7 Mudas) of Lean Manufacturing to not over-create the existing tools that we already had and get rid of unnecessary implementations, to save much more development/testing effort, extra cost and avoid any overproduction of what is not intended as a long-term way of working for the development team. “Every step to take is a waste of something”, so we got to think carefully. The few key parts are as below:
2.1 Front-end-related work: each component on the UI should be 100% reusable with guideline to re-pick up & style guide. We keep only the key features as a “standard & acceptable” MVP. Additional components are in the list to propose but will be implemented only upon the business requirement.
2.2 Back-end-related work/API services: remove unnecessary interaction with some backend services by ensuring that some features can be combined and used in one and remove unnecessary API callings.
2.3 Every developer is encouraged to do cross-functional jobs.
2.4 Resources who are free of tasks should be pulled to work either on future development tasks or on another project in need.
2.5 Automated test: investment at the initial phase but super cost-saving in a long run and can be handed over to the customers to maintain and re-run the test every time there are certain changes to the application level.
2.6 Reconsidering the cost models of the existing integrated tools — reducing the licenses, combining the user groups, tool replacement (if no such a big impact)
And many more to implement…
3.Recover — maintaining the CMS platform by fixing a lot of defects to make it a “workable software”, ready to be just slightly customized when the requirement is served to the development team and easy to use by an Admin user, as a non-tech person to monitor the CMS. This is how a workable product should go in order to meet the idea of sustainability in a long run.
4.Recycle — recycling certain dead components; whatever is not giving back any business value to the business units is not considered good for selling as a solution. Upcycling the boring UI/UX of the old-fashioned CMS to be another level of not merely a CMS, but a comprehensive all-in-one marketing suite in which we can play around the collected & analyzed data and have tele-interactions with the end users. This part is quite tricky and could go in contrast to the cost-friendly concept, since it requires a lot of integrated expensive tools. I and team leads had to work on the POC of marketing solution tools for the integration of such a thing. We found a marketing cloud, widely recommended and used by many world-leading companies. In such a marketing suite itself, it offers several plug-ins such as marketing campaign together with marketing analytics, aiming to target your site visitors by distinguishing the purchase/site visit history, age, genders , location etc.— the data can be intelligently analyzed, presented in forms of useful comprehensive data, divided into certain custom groups of clients and you can create a campaign of your products by shooting an E-mail or SMS to the target customers.
The proposed solution of constructing marketing tools onto the existing CMS was picked up and interested by a lot of business units.
I started to order a pizza more frequently than usual because I wanted to see how far “my pizza table” can be continuously upgraded. The pizza has been in almost all of my work routine since then as a part of “inspiration”. Even an Agile training that I gave to a Tech team included a pizza game workshop — the cheese, the crust and all those toppings keep regenerating my ideas.
But every ideally good thing always comes with a price and la vie n’est pas toujours en rose as you know…
To be continued in “I abandoned my pizza table — the finale”
