Saturday, November 05, 2005

Gentle Evolution

The blog page has a new look today. It’s more of a gentle evolution from the old design than a complete redesign. I don’t have the energy for a full redesign. This is the first in several gradual steps to evolve the site design. Expect more!

The original design can actually trace its lineage to the 1999 design for uidesign.net by Ann McCarthy. I collaborated with Rob Tapley to create the Agile Management site design in 2003 using the uidesign.net design as a starting template. As a result, it is all very old. It uses tables for layout and more than a few invisible GIFs for spacing. It needs to be updated to use web standards, <div> and <span> tags and proper CSS stylesheets. So the next iteration may well be invisible to the reader but it will lay important groundwork for future changes.

I want the blog part of this site to look more casual. I hope the new banner, branding logo and picture of me are puting across “casual.” I’ve got a hard reason for this soft choice. I want the blog to communicate thoughts, work in progress, and transient ideas. I reserve the papers section of the site for finished work. I’ve found over this past year that some readers have an expectation that blog entries are peer reviewed before posting or should never be changed after posting - even if they are wrong - or that the version history should be laid out for all to see. I don’t buy into that. This blog page is my sketch pad. Blog entries are just mind dumps. They usually take me no more than 15 minutes and are done late at night after a long day working at Microsoft.

If it looks casual, hopefully people will think casual and act accordingly. We’ll see…

Thursday, November 03, 2005

Recall Class Defect

We got our new car back today. “Big deal!” I might be hearing you say. Well, it’s been seven weeks since it was dramatically recalled. At that time, we’d had it only 3 weeks. On September 13th, my wife called me to say that Mazda had towed the car away. Earlier in the morning she’d had a call from the dealer. “We’re recalling your car, ma’am. We’d like to send a tow truck to collect it.” “Can this wait?” she’d replied. “We have a play date this afternoon.” “No ma’am. Do not use the vehicle. We don’t want you driving that car!” “But what if I’d been driving it now as you called me?” “Well ma’am we’d be asking you to pull over and wait for our truck to arrive.” What in heavens name could be so serious? Ironically, it was a day when we were putting the Beta 3 of Team Foundation to bed at Microsoft. Everyone on our team was aware that we were shipping Beta 3 unless a “recall class” issue was found. Few of us in our “soft” business understand the significance of the term “recall class”. In the auto industry, however, they take recalls very seriously indeed. Recall class defects are big issues!

It turned out that there was a risk of fire with our Mazda 5 when the vehicle was left idling for prolonged periods of time. Mazda executives had acted quickly to protect their customer - and themselves from future lawsuits. On the day of the recall, they hadn’t even designed a fix for the problem, never mind manufactured or distributed the parts. So, to have achieved all of that in 7 weeks shows what’s possible when everyone is focused on a problem.

Given our recent family circumstances, the fact that our car had been recalled was by far the least of our worries. However, our new Mazda 5 has six seats - one of the compelling reasons for buying it to replace our aging Subaru Forester which had served us well since arriving in the US in 1999. Not to mention that we love the compact size that means it’s easy to park in any tight inner city lot, or the sliding doors that prevent small children from denting daddy’s car when opening a door inside the garage. At the time, we envisgaed 6 seats to be useful for play dates - 2 moms, 4 kids. We had no notion that, suddenly, we’d be needing six seats. Suddenly, we only had one fit driver in the family and a set of worried in-laws to ferry around. Our loaner - a Mazda 6 sedan, just wouldn’t cut it. How our local dealer, University Mazda, dealt with this issue was commendable. No sooner had I explained the problem to the sales manager than he immediately offered to swap the loaner for a new MPV minivan off the lot. A couple of days later, we collected a new MPV with delivery mileage that has served to bus the family around this past 4 weeks of medical turmoil. True customer service from a care dealer that cared!

Overall, how Mazda dealt with this recall seems commendable to me. Within 24 hours of discovering the problem, they had recalled and impounded the 2000 affected vehicles. The same day they sent every owner an email. We’ve had 3 other formal communications from them with updates during the period. We will also be receiving some financial compensation for the inconvenience. The cost of a 7 week recall that affected 10,000 manufactured vehicles (though only 2000 had been sold through to consumers) must have been pretty dramatic. So what happened?...

What we know for sure. Only US vehicles were affected. The US model features a 2.3L engine not sold anywhere else. In other parts of the planet they get by just fine with 1.8L and 2.0L engines. The problem related to potential fires underneath the vehicle from overheating after long idle times. The parts replaced included the catalytic converter and a bracket mounting the exhaust. The car was launched earlier than originally scheduled. Mazda hoped to catch the wave of demand, this past summer, for smaller vehicles with better fuel economy as gasoline in the US passed the $3 per gallon mark for the first time. Most accounts claim that launch was accelerated by 3 months (or possibly more).

So now let’s speculate a bit. The US market is expected to take only 20,000 vehicles per year. This isn’t a money spinner for Mazda, more a branding thing. The Mazda 5 is cool! The car they sell as the Matsuda Premacy in Japan is quirky by US standards and aimed at an unusual niche - the young urban dweller with a young and growing family. It’s for moms who are too hip to steer a boat along suburban boulevards on the way to soccer practice. In fact, Mazda won’t use the “m” word. They prefer to market the vehicle as a MAV - multi-activity vehicle. It’s not a van. Honest, it’s not! Official! The US sales volume is so small that the vehicles are made in Japan. It wasn’t worthwhile tooling a plant in the US. Compared to global volume, US sales are miniscule.

Now let’s consider that 2.3L engine. Hmmm. It’s a different SKU. It’s a bigger engine. Does it generate more heat? Now, let’s consider the testing department guys - the ones who do the non-functional testing. You know the kind of guys who have to wake up in the dead of night in arctic conditions to try the cold start mechanism. And then, some marketing exec asks them to test a different SKU for a small niche market in North America on a compressed schedule to take advantage of a unique market opportunity. Is it just possible that some non-functional testing was delayed until after the vehicle was brought market?

So, in summary, marketing needed the product sooner, we could speculate that testing got the squeeze. The result - a recall class defect escaped and a costly recall resulted. How familiar does this scenario sound in our own industry? How often do we squeeze testing to rush something to market and let the customers suffer the pain? The only difference is the transaction cost of the recall. You can’t download a new catalytic converter over your broadband connection!