It’s almost that time again. When the interests of me, my wife and my son all magically align in television bliss!
The show is called MasterChef – and if you haven’t seen it, this season’s premier is on May 22nd on Fox. It’s kind of like American Idol for chefs. They go around the country in search of America’s best amateur chef. Once they have made the first cut, they begin weeding the contestants out through special challenges and tests until only one “America’s Master Chef” remains.
It’s great fun for all of us. My wife loves to cook, so she seeks inspiration. My son will probably own a restaurant some day, so he loves to watch how the show’s mentor chefs operate. And me? Well, I just love to eat, so it works for me too!
One of the show’s mentor chefs is Gordon Ramsey. Unlike some of his other shows where he is always screaming, he is generally very supportive on this show. And he has one phrase that he repeats over and over – and which has a lesson for us in the world of IT.
“TASTE EVERYTHING”
Chef Ramsey must say this phrase at least twice in every show. He is always amazed that a contestant, who is fighting for their dream, will bring a dish to be evaluated when they haven’t even tasted it themselves. “Did you taste this?” he’ll ask a contestant. The meaning is clear. Had they tasted it, they wouldn’t need him to tell them how bad it was. They would have made something else.
Those two words say so much. They say: “Show me that you care about what you’re going to serve me. Show me that you care about quality. Show me that you’re a professional.” Because when a contestant doesn’t taste everything that they are serving they are saying the exact opposite.
But it’s easy to understand how this can happen, right? They are trying to get a meal done. There’s a lot of pressure. Things go wrong. So they lose sight of what they’re really trying to do – make an amazing dish that tastes great! They rush and deliver something – but something that shouldn’t have been delivered in the first place.
I think that most of us in IT are guilty of this very thing. There is so much pressure to deliver that we forget to “taste everything.” We turn out products and services that don’t work, that deliver a poor customer experience and that generally leave a bad taste in the mouths of our customers. But we don’t know it. Because we never taste it.
When was the last time that you actually consumed one of your services from the perspective of your customer? I know that I was as guilty as anyone when I was running my own technical operations shop. When something wasn’t working, I didn’t call the service desk. I called Jennifer, my Service Desk Manager. She took care of it for me. How true is this across the spectrum of IT organizations? How often do we “taste” the services that we’re dishing up?
Seth Godin, the author of a massive library of business and marketing books, believes that this is the root of many problems. What would happen, he wondered, if we always had to put our name on everything we did? Imagine calling into a Service Desk and being greeted with, “Thank you for calling the ACME Service Desk. The support process you are now experiencing was designed and implemented by Joe Smith…” Might we take it more seriously knowing that if our service or product failed that everyone knew that it came from us?
I think that there is a very important lesson here for all of us in IT. We need to make it a point to routinely sample our own services. We need to employ “secret shoppers” who can experience our services in an unbiased fashion. We need to look at every step of our delivery from our customer’s point of view and demonstrate to them that we care about them, that we care about quality and that we take our profession seriously.
Two little words that, if we take them to heart, can really change a lot.
Taste everything!
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