Simplification

I first watched Highlander in the late 80’s on tv (it was a flop in cinemas, grossing just $6m in the US against a spend of $16m). And until a few weeks ago that was the last time I had seen it. And yet it captured my imagination: the immortal Scottish Highlander who has been alive for 400 years; the tragedy of watching everyone he loves grow old; the beheadings as “there can only be one” immortal; finally the prize of knowing everything; and of course who didn’t love the Queen soundtrack...

There’s plenty of faults in the movie (which my adult self noticed): Sean Connery as an Egyptian with a Spanish name and an Edinburgh accent. Christopher Lambert as a Scot with his almost unintelligible Swiss accent… scenes that feel like dodgy eighties horror movies (vividly when The Kurgan is driving Brenda). And yet there’s something really enjoyable about it.

The phrase “There can only be one” has been rolling around in my head for the last few weeks, mostly because it captures something I’ve been trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to do for the last decade: get rid of unnecessary systems and simplify to a common platform. I did think for a while that Mary Kondo’s cleaning tips would be more apt way of describing simplification. But honestly, simplifying systems is more like the violence and heartache in Highlander than Mary Kondo’s keeping just the things you love — there are systems that people have built careers on, and even with their hideous architectural deformities have been near impossible for business owners to let go of. Ironically, over my career, the easiest systems to get rid of have been the newest -- front end mobile and web systems. It has been true here at Australia Post as it was at NAB. The old, apparently immortal systems, are the hardest to behead -- and in their own way deeply loved.

Over the next few weeks we will be a step closer to a single platform — as we move off five of our scanner platform systems, replacing them with just one. The scanner platform is the main work tool for the vast majority of Australia Post's workforce. The new scanner platform is a ruggedised Zebra android device. It has been a herculean effort to deploy 35,000 scanners at 400 each day with the help of Telstra. To get onto one platform has taken alignment across the entire business to achieve — from the Post Office network, to the facilities, to the Posties, to the Startrack business, to Parcel Post and to People & Culture. We can already see that deploying change is magnitudes faster and can be deployed daily with our automated build, testing and deployment (rather than the quarterly releases); with a very simple user interface, and a rich platform that we can build from. In fact the program of work to modernise all of our Post Office systems will run on this single scanner platform. Like Connor in Highlander we will have a platform that understands everything that is going on (and in our case so that we can better serve our customers).

But why bother trying to simplify at all? Why not just keep building at pace? Having seen billions of dollars spent on core system replacements that added rather than replaced, at some level for a CIO, building new customer interfaces is actually a surer approach. Of course the irony is that by building lots of new systems at pace, eventually all that agility builds complexity that eventually slows you down.

We set out nearly three years ago to build the case for Simplification (we are the usual corporate with many acquisitions, half-finished experiments, incomplete decommissions, pet projects that didn’t align to strategy). And while we’ve been transforming and building new capability, last year we finally managed to take out more systems than we put in -- the first time in Australia Post's history. In fact over the last 3 years we have managed to remove about 350 systems -- a mix of tiny reporting system to decommissioning payroll systems and core product systems.

And so with one (scanner) platform to rule them all we are heading into our highest ever peak processing. Check out your postie / driver / post office! 

@MunroFarmer @PeterAsikamidis @DanielGriggs @ChristineKeet @ChristinaChu @ BobBlack @RebeccaValastro @Anita Matusewski @Glenn Stuttard @John Ieraci @ Katheryn Jones @Brett Newstead @Thomas Bianculli