Following on from Good to Great (rules to live by) post.

One thing that constantly irks me is the “It’s not my job” syndrome. This is most apparent in call centers “Sorry I can’t help you with this, let me transfer you to..” [cue another 10min wait time]. We’ve all been on the receiving end of that one and can attest to how we get annoyed by it. This also manifests itself in development teams and developed systems.

The biggest impact you as a IT person (be it developer, analyst, project manager) can make, is take a ‘full circle’ approach to your interactions both within a team and directly with clients and your developments. What do I mean ? take extra time out of your day when faced with an issue, that’s not technically your, or your apps responsibility, to solve it completely for your client or team member. Or if you can’t solve it, take ownership in handing it off properly**. The end result is to have the initiator of the request client, user etc, not required to go elsewhere to solve their initial problem.

Why would we possibly want to do this, when our time could be better served browsing Digg, checking out Facebook, breaking out the office xbox ?

- Client is vastly happier, happy clients pay bills, come back for more work, and refer you/your company
- You get credit, and respect within the team and from the client
- You will likely gain greater domain knowledge
- You will likely see opportunities in your app to further improve it’s usability

Lets look at some examples:

… as applied to a hosting management

Case: Your client forget to renew their domain name

The standard approach is to send them an email ‘you need to renew your domain name’. The full circle approach is to lookup their domain registry details, tell them where and how to renew their domain name - as so often clients have simply no idea. Takes an extra 15mins of your time but you will be rewarded massively in return. If you’re really on the ball you’ll pop in your calendar an annual recurring reminder to make sure it gets renewed ahead of time.

… as applied to internal development

Case: You stumbled across a bug you think most people won’t notice.

The likely approach would be to fix the bug you found and case closed. Lets say you made a mistake that caused all historical orders in a system to miss the city off the shipping details. So the first approach is to go ‘ooops, shouldn’t have done that, let’s fix it here and move on’. Taking a full circle approach to it would be to go and contact everyone who was affected by it and let them know what the problem was, how it would present itself, that you found the problem, fixed it, and what would occur now. By being open and honest with them and taking the time out to inform them, will gain trust and appreciation.

Suffice to say if the little bug was caused by you and resulted in a minor loss of a few million dollars it might be time to hang up the keyboard and quickly get out of dodge.

… as applied to developing a system

Case: An order system ships stuff via a major shipper, tracking number’s get emailed to the buyer. ( This one is my personal pet peeve )

How about your system goes away to your shipper(s) requests shipping information, and updates your user. So you don’t require your user to go elsewhere to find shipping information. Better yet - when your shipping service says delivered how about an email 24 hrs later “We have been notified your package has been delivered, please click on this link to let us know you’ve received your package and if you may have any comments you can make them there”. That way your system has a true end to end connection with the user from the time the order was placed, till it hits their doorstep.

In summary

Whenever interacting with someone, take time out to put yourselves in their shoes, and ask yourself was this problem completely solved for me? Take ownership and pride in the solution and you will be rewarded 10x over with fellow team members and clients, willingness to work with you in the future.

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** Handing something off properly ? How so ? For the love of god never expect your client to explain everything all over again to another team member. Talk to the client, say you can’t personally solve it, however you’ve given all the details to person x and they will be contacting them, you’ll follow up in y timeframe to make sure it’s all their issue has been dealt with a-ok.