If the people in your software support team seem like aliens from another planet who have no idea about how your business works, you need to send them back to wherever they came from and find a team that speaks your language and understands the urgency of fixing critical business software.
1. Don’t accept “What did you do wrong?”
You: I just added a new sales order, but it’s not in the system!
Software support: What did you do wrong?
If something that has worked for days, weeks, months or years suddenly doesn’t work, there’s a 99% probability that you didn’t do anything wrong and the issue is with your network, hardware, or software. Don’t accept “you did something wrong” as your software manager’s first response every time there’s an issue.
2. Don’t accept non-answers and techno-speak
You: I just added a new sales order, but it’s not in the system!
Software support: Initial index analysis indicates a 48% cost hash match aggregate, so I may need to optimize the view this is using. I’m looking at replacing the udf with an inline SQL, but that shouldn’t cause data loss; however, if 225 seconds is near the ADO.Net command timeout then that could explain a user/UI timeout, which might have caused the data loss, though you would have gotten a SOAP exception, so that didn’t happen. I could execute the sproc in production with the same parameters you used. If we run it with a BEGIN / ROLLBACK it will not affect any data. . .
If you are getting this kind of techno-speak non-answer from your software team, look for a bi-lingual liaison who can translate Business into Computer and vice versa.
3. Don’t believe “I know more about your department than you do!”
You: I just added a new sales order, but it’s not in the system!
Software support: Well, I can look at it if you want, but I keep telling you that you don’t handle sales orders correctly anyway. What you’re doing is not the way Acme Inc. handled sales orders, and I have a master’s degree in blah, blah, blah and so I know what you should be doing.
Most business managers are happy to hear constructive suggestions for improvement. But nobody likes working with a know it all, especially one who repeatedly tells you that the way a former company did things was correct and the way it’s done in the current company is wrong. And when you have a software problem, you don’t want to hear that your business process is wrong – you want the software problem fixed!
When your software support your business processes, your software team may get a great overview of how the company works, and maybe they will have constructive suggestions for improvement. However, if they dodge and delay fixes by focusing on ways your company isn’t doing things right, that’s just wrong.
What should you hear?
You: I just added a new sales order, but it’s not in the system!
Software support: Wow – that’s a problem, and we’ll get it fixed as soon as possible. Can you walk me through the steps that led to the problem so I can try to reproduce and fix it?
If you’d like to get this kind of response from your software team, contact DragonPoint. We speak business, and we understand the importance of having software that works for you.
