Every time I make a restaurant reservation online, I am sent an email survey after the meal. Every time I get my car serviced, I’m asked about my satisfaction. After I buy something from an increasing number of online merchants, I’m asked to rate the transaction. Stay at a hotel. Watch a movie. Send an e-card to a friend for his birthday.

“Thank you for booking your recent reservation through OpenTable. We would appreciate your feedback about your experience at Ruth’s Chris Steak House?” asks OpenTable.

“As a valued HHonors member, your feedback is important to us. We invite you to take a few minutes to complete a survey about your stay at Hilton Anaheim,” requests Dave Horton, Global Head of Hilton Hotels.

“Thank you for staying at Millennium Knickerbocker Hotel Chicago. We would appreciate it if you would spare a minute of your time to share your opinion of the hotel with us. Your evaluation of our people, facilities and services will provide us the opportunity to work toward serving you better on your future visits,” writes David Cockburn, Senior Vice President of Operations for the U.S. Region of Millennium & Copithorne Hotels.

“We understand you recently had work completed at your Acura dealership and wanted to be sure we’re meeting your service expectations. Your experience is unique and we’d appreciate hearing about it,” says an unsigned Acura email.

If you don’t fill out surveys, you are reminded and reminded. Acura sent out three reminders to fill out the post-service questionnaire, on Oct. 13, Oct. 14 and Oct. 17.

At least CaféPress is offering some compensation for my time. But no, I don’t want to fill out a survey every time I stay in a hotel, eat in a restaurant, get my oil changed or buy a t-shirt.

Post-transaction surveys make sense. One reason is metrics – they truly want to see their scores rise. This is true both of the local Acura dealer and also of the Acura nationwide organization, which needs to learn about both exceptional and troubled dealers.

Another reason is to deflect customer complaints, especially public ones that can harm the merchant’s reputation. Cranky consumers love flaming online and bricks-and-mortar vendors on Yelp or Twitter.. The theory is that if Hilton gets me a survey fast, perhaps I’ll be less motivated to go onto Yelp. Plus, of course, Hilton has an opportunity to intervene and get me to retract my diatribe.

The downside is that I’m drowning in a sea of post-transactional surveys. My family had three cars serviced in October. To date we have received 10 – 10! – survey requests about those service visits.

Let’s look at this from the software development perspective. It is easy to set up the online surveys with Web landing pages, automatic emails, and reminder tracking for non-responders.

In fact, it is too easy to set up those surveys. Because the incremental cost of each survey is approximately US$0, we have no reason to hold back from surveying every transaction, no matter how small. We have no reason to hold back from sending reminder after reminder after reminder.

We are not serving our customers. We are harassing them by burying them in requests for customer feedback.

Next time a line-of-business manager asks you to set up an automated post-transaction survey with lots of emailed reminders, please bring up this possibility…. Or at the least, add it to the survey.

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick

If you don’t measure, you don’t know how you’re doing. You don’t know what works and what doesn’t. You can’t figure out what to fix. And you can’t determine if your fixes actually work.

Do you make coffee? Every morning I make a pot at home. For many years, I’ve scooped out the coffee until it looks about right. Most mornings the coffee tastes good. Some mornings it’s incredibly delicious. Some days it’s too strong. Some days it’s too watery.

That changed in September, after I read an article in the New York Times, “Tipping the Balance for Kitchen Scales.” The author, Farhad Manjoo, uses making consistently delicious coffee as one of his anecdotes. He explained that if you use volumetric measures (like a scoop) you’re not getting a consistent amount, due both to variations in the density of the substance as well as in the accuracy of eyeballing the quantity.

Following Mr. Manjoo’s advice, we purchased an inexpensive Oxo digital kitchen scale. I tried scooping out coffee the old way, and then measured the results. The average was around 120 grams, which made pretty good coffee — but there could be a 20-30 gram swing. Even so, 120 grams wasn’t bad.

Then we started experimenting. 120 grams. 110 grams. 100 grams. 80 grams. 70 grams.

It turns out that my family loves the coffee when we use 75 grams of ground beans per pot. That’s significantly less than what we had been making. Each day our morning coffee is consistently perfect. (A pound of beans goes a lot farther too, yielding 6.0 pots instead of 3.7 pots.)

Put down the coffee scoop and open your development dashboard. How efficient are your architects, developers, designs, testers, managers? Do you know? Have you measured source lines of code created per day? Analyzed function points? Looked at defects or security flaws per KSLOC? Counted the requirements added or changed per iteration? Elapsed time per defect remediation? Variation from time or cost estimates per feature? Time spent on non-refactoring rework? Developer time spent on non-development activities?

There are a gazillion metrics specified by ISO and CMMI, as well as other best practices widely known in our industry. Do you use them?

If you don’t measure, you don’t know what is working well, and where you need to improve. If you don’t measure, you don’t know if your fixes are making things better or are making things worse. If you don’t measure, you can’t drive toward consistent performance and consistent delivery.

Z Trek Copyright (c) Alan Zeichick