Its friday today !
Quite a stressful day, my customer ask me why I can’t find out the root cause of the problem. Project life is so stressful in the bank things are so screw up, they control this control that until the vendor need to speculate those reported incident. Well most of the financial project I have done they are all like that ! Lucky that I have my World of warcraft game to cheer me up every now and then. Last night I was too tired to stay awake for raiding.
August 11th, 2007 at 8:16 am
oh yeah the ‘root cause’ thing, ya it drove me nuts for 2 years! a 5 minute fix would take a week to go through UAT because they want to test all related screens and different scenarios to make sure that it’s really resolved. they have a full workload so sometimes they stay back to test ur stuff, so it’s not nice for them to find the problem keep coming back… no point rushing in this case as they really need to be thorough. in fact, i had a very ethical ex-colleague who was very honest to users and the users fed back to me that they really appreciate it. even if they did not like to hear about the problems in the system. also, he would be the one spending late nights in office trying to solve them. that’s why they liked him so much. the project lead would not go into details so much about the problem, his assurances became less believable in the end as more problems arose. he usually didn’t say much to users but would do something about them behind the scenes. these are the 2 approaches to the ‘root cause’ problem i’ve seen! mine was somewhere in between these 2 guys. anyway, good luck in handling them!
August 11th, 2007 at 8:21 am
also i was very lucky to have users who are very professional in reporting the incidents, so troubleshooting and pinpointing the problem was much easier… u might want to train ur users too… so that no need to speculate. i guess control is there because alot of money is involved… i would be scared if my bank does not control it’s production environment!!