Front Loading

When you're dealing with a problem, the most important thing you can do is determine what the actual problem is. Too often, you start working on something that someone already defined for you.

Unfortunately, this means you're "fixing" something that may not be broken -- in fact, it may just be a symptom for something else.

Using a recent technical problem that came to my attention, I'd like to show how there are many layers to common problems, and how radically different solutions can be depending upon how you initially analyze what's going wrong.

Opening The Box

It comes with a box to ship it safely. Take the brain out as soon as it arrives, and throw away the box.

We hear about how "thinking out of the box" is a good thing, and it is. How far you go outside the box, however, can be the critical difference in decision making. One company handled their technical problem inside the box, and it may cost them more than they should have spent.

This company is located right near the Fleet Center in Boston. This summer, the Democratic National Convention will be hosted there, and for one week, all of the local buildings nearby will be closed by the Secret Service. Only a handful of essential staff will be allowed into the buildings.

Because the company's staff consists mostly of customer service representatives, this poses a big problem. The majority of the workforce needs to be in the building, on the company phones, handling customer needs, to be profitable.

When the IT department looked into the possibility of having each of the representatives work from home, they found that they couldn't get enough new phone lines into the building to cover the bandwidth needs. Basically, the current system allows maybe ten people to work from home at the same time. With almost 200 customer service reps, that wasn't going to work. None of the local loop providers could get the new lines by the end of the year, nevermind by July.

The decision was then to basically close the office, and have only a few people calling in from home. Most of the employees are taking a forced vacation, and the company is looking at a huge loss in service. They get paid for every call they handle, and since they're going to be operating at about 5% of their capacity, they're looking at a huge hit.

Finding The Real Problem
The problem this company faced wasn't that they couldn't get enough high-bandwidth phone lines into the building -- that's what they thought their problem was. In all reality, their real problem was that they needed to have 200 phone-based representatives have two things: access to the company's database, and access to a phone line.

Right away, they started off with the wrong premise. Obviously, any solution isn't going to be the best one, unless there was a lot of luck involved.

Outside Thinking With The Wrong Logic

When this guy says "No," find someone who's going to say, "Yes."

Even with this wrong premise, there were still better answers. When the phone company says they can't install the lines you need, you call another phone company. When you've called all the phone companies, and they all say they can't do it, you don't stop there.

You find a non-phone-company solution. Yes, the phone company generally installs high-bandwidth lines, but phone companies aren't the only people who can set up high-bandwidth solutions.

New Solution #1 -- The Cable Companies
Cable companies run high-bandwidth wires into houses every day. They're great at it. You can push a whole lot of information down a coaxial cable. Just because the web site for Comcast says that they only install 4Mb/second lines, it doesn't mean you can't call them and see if they can make a customizeable solution. They also have their own technicians, so they don't have to sub-contract out to the phone company (which almost every phone competitor has to do).

Remember: with everything you do, you should always ask. The worst anyone can say is "no." (My mom taught me that)

Some of the national senior staff for RCN (another cable company) are stationed right in downtown Boston. If ever there was a time for them to make a name for themselves, setting up a new very high-bandwidth service, this would be a golden opportunity. They've got a guaranteed client base (the companies near the Fleet Center), and it would make a great, free news article. Guaranteed clients *and* free publicity?

It only would have taken a phone call.

New Solution #2 -- Wireless Microwaves

That one day it would come to this... who'da thunk it?

Most companies shy away from wireless connections simply because they're a broadcast method. They also don't have as high a bandwidth as traditional Cat5, coaxial, and fiber cables.

In a strange twist of irony, many of these companies are only a few blocks away from Internet Service Providers (ISP's) that have high-bandwitdth service. All they have to do is make the connection to that building, and viola! Problem solved.

Microwave networking is a very high-bandwidth solution, can connect two buildings with speeds up to 22Mbps. The expense of this option would simply have been mapping the best line-of-sight route between the buildings housing the company and the ISP. Since microwave networking can go rather far (up to 30 miles between any two repeaters or end units), they could have connected to any ISP within that range.

New Solution #3 -- Wireless Optical Networking
Wireless optical networking is simply a series of lasers set up to broadcast your data. This point-to-point system works much like microwave networking, only it's more secure, and is capable of extremely higher data transfer rates (some as high as OC-48, or roughly 2488Mbps).

Obviously price is the only issue, but when faced with losing a week's worth of income, it may have proven a profitable option (and a great safety net should outages or similar situations arise again in the future).

The Real Problems, and The Real Solutions

Even with these three great options, they were still not the best resolution to the real original problem. Getting better bandwidth inside the building was misleading. The real solution was to get the database out of the company building, and to provide 200 customer service representatives with phone lines switched from the main company phone number.

Don't try to get to the ship through the neck of the bottle! The bottle isn't the problem.

For a ridiculously low price, Verizon, the local phone company, can switch as many numbers as you'd like for you using call forwarding. All your phone reps simply sit at home near their home PC's, and their phones will ring when someone dials the main number. Setting up a hunt group with Verizon would also simulate the duties of your company's phone switch. As long as they have high-speed Internet access, they can work from home. If not, their workstations could have been moved to a temporary office where a high-speed line was available.

That Bottlenecked Database
Since everyone focused on getting to the database, they missed the option of simply taking the database out of the bottle! A company like Akamai is always happy to host all of your business applications and databases! They have better Internet hopping technologies, and can almost always provide faster access to your online applications for both your employees and your clients.

By moving the database onto Akamai servers, there's now no need to get a high-speed line into the company's building. It can now be reached from any place with an Internet connection. With some serious planning, all 200 employees could have been connected to the Internet, and have a phone nearby that would ring just like they were sitting in their cubicle.

Frontloading
This is a great example of frontloading, where instead of putting things in the order that seems normal, you look for the best way of organizing your problems so that they can be solved more simply and effectively. Don't try to force your way through bottlenecks -- remove your targets from the bottles! Granted, in some instances you're just not going to have the time to fix serious problems. Then again, you can always try, because the worst anybody can say is "no."