Net Simplicity Score (NSS) gets a little more complex

In last Tuesday’s post, I asked the community here on PAOSS and on TM Forum’s Engage platform for ideas about how you would benchmark complexity.

I also provided a reference to an old post that described the concept of a NSS (Net Simplicity Score) for our OSS/BSS.

Due to the complexity of factors that contribute to a complexity score, the NSS is a “catch-all” simplicity metric. Hopefully it will allow subtraction projects to be easily justified, just as the NPS (Net Promoter Score) metric has helped justify customer experience initiatives.

The NSS (Net Simplicity Score), could be further broken down into:

  • The NCSS (Net Customer Simplicity Score) – A ranking from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) how easy is it to choose and use the company / product / service? This is an external metric (ie the ranking of the level of difficulty that your customers face)
  • The NOSS (Net Operator Simplicity Score) – A ranking from 0 (lowest) to 10 (highest) how easy is it to choose and use the company / product / service? This is an internal metric (ie for operators to rank complexity of systems and their constituent applications / data / processes)

One interesting item of feedback came from Ronald Hasenberger. He rightly pointed out that just because something is simple for users to interact with, doesn’t mean it’s simple behind the scenes – often exactly the opposite. The iPod example I used in earlier posts is a case in point. The iPod was more intuitive than existing MP3 players, but a huge amount of design and engineering went into making it that way. The underlying “system” certainly wasn’t simple.

So perhaps there’s a third simplicity factor to add to the two bullets listed above:

  • The NSSS (Net System Simplicity Score) – and this one does require a more sophisticated algorithm than just an aggregate of perceptions. Not only that, but it’s the one that truly reflects the systems we design and build. I wonder whether the first two are an initial set of proxies that help drive complexity out of our solutions, but we need to develop Ronald’s third one to make the biggest impact?

Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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