More mid-west meetings
I've just come back from a trip to one of the great lake states where I had to try and placate one of our customers who has been suffering from a software bug that up until a few days ago had baffled us for the last five months. The problem was simply that we could not reproduce it, and bugs without replication steps are near on impossible to fix.
The "lucky" breakthrough came about because I finally got to do something that I had wanted, no demanded to do, for at least the last three months, and that something was simply to talk with the users to find out what they were actually doing. All it took was an hour or so of questioning the right people, and hey presto, the path was illuminated. Twenty four hours later we understood the cause, and had a fix.
Why the customers IT people were unable to get this information from their own people just baffles and angers me.
The odd thing is that I thought that their IT department had done a superb job in rolling out the software to the users. They first recruited popular IT literate people from the user group and got them involved with the acceptance testing so that they could understand what the software was to do, and how to use it. They then used these people to spread the good word about the system, and explain to sometimes sceptical recipients how it would make their jobs easier; after all, its one thing for a business manager to say "its good, so use it", its quite another thing if that same message comes from one of your own boys or girls. Once the system was rolled out, these people then became the first point of help for the new users. In short this is about as good as it could be, so what went wrong? Well I know, but liable is such a nasty thing, so I'm keeping shtum.
The sad part is that those who left last week when our office closed really, really, really wanted to have this problem fixed before they left; so I suppose its typical that the cause should have been found only a few days after they went.
Of course I will be letting them know.
The "lucky" breakthrough came about because I finally got to do something that I had wanted, no demanded to do, for at least the last three months, and that something was simply to talk with the users to find out what they were actually doing. All it took was an hour or so of questioning the right people, and hey presto, the path was illuminated. Twenty four hours later we understood the cause, and had a fix.
Why the customers IT people were unable to get this information from their own people just baffles and angers me.
The odd thing is that I thought that their IT department had done a superb job in rolling out the software to the users. They first recruited popular IT literate people from the user group and got them involved with the acceptance testing so that they could understand what the software was to do, and how to use it. They then used these people to spread the good word about the system, and explain to sometimes sceptical recipients how it would make their jobs easier; after all, its one thing for a business manager to say "its good, so use it", its quite another thing if that same message comes from one of your own boys or girls. Once the system was rolled out, these people then became the first point of help for the new users. In short this is about as good as it could be, so what went wrong? Well I know, but liable is such a nasty thing, so I'm keeping shtum.
The sad part is that those who left last week when our office closed really, really, really wanted to have this problem fixed before they left; so I suppose its typical that the cause should have been found only a few days after they went.
Of course I will be letting them know.
posted by Snow Jester at 10:51 pm
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