It's going to sink us.

[bastardbybirth.livejournal.com]

Hi just joined this community for reasons concerning the new program that my company wants to implement. I'm a Support Analyst (Glorified tech support) and have only been with the company for about 9 months and even I an see that this is going to cause major battles between us and our sites.

After hearing about and bearing witness to all the issues and bugs with our new software I have made this comparison.

THIS IS SWISS CHEESE:



THIS IS MY COMPANIES NEW PROGRAM:



Notice anything. I'm dreading the day when the sites that have already bought this program go live, which is not very far off.

Comments

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

Open a case for every bug in the product "for tracking purposes", and ask if you can "escalate them asking for regular updates". Most Support managers I've met are happy to have an accountability trail. Once you have a paper trail, you can watch the fireworks go up the management chain.

[jecook]

+eleventy BILLION.

[bastardbybirth.livejournal.com]

not having people know about the issues isn't the problem. It's the fact that everyone knows about them but refuse to do anything about it. And tech support are going to cop all the crap as we are the first line of defense.

Say for one bug. The user is allowed to add in their own codes for items and instructions in a particular section of the program. The data is then supposed to be updated within tables in the database. However the script that performs this function was not included in the final release and isn't going to be added anytime soon.

Solution: have tech support update all the new codes that the site adds in everyday. This will have to be done for each individual code, it can't all be done in one big group.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Better solution: have the problem logged and sent up the chain. If it's not assigned to developers, it becomes management's problem by default, at whatever level it last stalled at.

When someone asks about the issue, give them the direct contact for whoever's 'working' on it.

[ianhess.livejournal.com]

Understood, and I empathize. Its just been my experience that there is a dividing altitude line in management structures where the message goes from "everyone shut up, be happy, and move in that direction" to "if we can't meet the contractual obligations of our end users, we will make a change". I think the trick is getting the message to that point with some element of diplomacy and a metric ton of documented proof. YMMV.