The Weird Path of the Postal Service
May 31, 2016   Karen Bartram

Is the shortest path always the best?

In order to be qualified to work in the direct mail industry, I started my career as a letter carrier for the Postal Service.  As a letter carrier in a suburban neighborhood I was supposed to follow the sidewalks as I delivered the mail, never cutting across the finely manicured lawns of my postal patrons.  I learned from my more experienced fellow carriers that that policy was to be strictly adhered to on my first day on the job, and when route inspectors might accompany me to determine how long it took to walk the route.  On other days I bounded across the lawns of my patrons, their dogs nipping at my heels, so I could join my fellow carriers in the park for the afternoon. Today, when the Postal Service develops a new product or service they are similarly supposed to walk along the product development sidewalk, working with the industry and other stakeholders to carefully develop and test said products and services.  Lately though, they have gotten so excited and anxious to roll out new products, they have trampled the metaphorical lawns of tasteful development and kind of rushed things to market.  They call it “agile” development – we call it a path through our lawn that someone is going to need to patch. Two cases in point are the Informed Twins of 2016 – Informed Visibility and Informed Delivery.  You can be forgiven for getting the two mixed up – everybody does. With Informed Visibility, the updated version of IMb Tracing, USPS’ mail tracking service, the schedule for a broad swath of improvements has been a bit overly aggressive, with pilot testing planned before the technical manual is even written.  Dozens of basic details continue to be hashed out or even brought up for the first time weeks before deployment is planned, which involves moving a pretty big data pipeline – I mean, what could possibly go wrong?  Umm…we’ll see… Informed Delivery, wherein a moody black and white photo of your mail is emailed to enrolled postal patrons (and maybe later a clickable ad), is in the early stages of a second pilot test in the New York City area.  They loved it in Northern Virginia, but that first pilot may have been slanted by an awful lot of Postal Employees in the test area.  The MTAC work group on the subject brought up a long list of issues regarding pricing, privacy, the long term impact on advertising mail volume and more.  Still, the Postmaster General outranks MTAC, so it will roll out in 2017 (tentatively April) regardless of issues.  We’ll figure them out later.  Still ahead of them is the massive task of getting the American public interested in even seeing what’s in their mailbox. Like the letter carrier tramping the azaleas, agile development may be faster than walking on the sidewalk and the Postal Service is certainly anxious to get these products out, and fix the faults later. However, it may make for a difficult launch.  Do not expect a smooth deployment, and you might be wise to expect a few stops and starts with both programs over the next year or two. At SnailWorks we’re excited about these new services too, and we’re anxious to enhance our products.  Stay tuned – we’ll keep you up to the minute on new developments.

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