Customer Support

A couple of days ago I had a good conversation with a friend of mine regarding customer support. Before going into the actual discussion, I want to say that I'm a very strong believer in actively engaging your customers/users on all level, specifically one of the competitive advantages any organization can develop is having great support. In fact there is no excuse for not having great support. You don't have to be a big company, you don't have to use any fancy management system, you don't need to hire special experts at doing so. All you need is the will to establish great support and the persistence to actually go and do that. Establishing great support, from my experience, has one of the biggest ROI in the organization. But back to the discussion, specifically what we talked about...

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Posted in: Random Thoughts,Self Improvment

Flexible Planning

I sometimes have trouble with explaining to people the basic concept behind agile way of thought regarding project planning and management. Recently i cam across this gem, which as far as i could tell is unrelated to software but in my eyes does a marvelous job at explaining these ideas. just to make sure i understand, I’ll recap his main points. there are two way of planning and managing a project: the classical way – set your goals as the result you want to achieve, from those goes backward and derive the steps needed in order to achieve these goals.from these decide on your plan of action and than just try to follow that plan. Flexible Planning – goes a little different. you still start out by setting the goals as desired results. but instead of going backward from them, you start...

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Posted in: Agile Principles,Planning,Random Thoughts

Experience of a beginner

One of the thing i really like about being a consultant, is that i get a chance experience first time reaction of people i’m consulting to the new practices. Sometimes these reaction are suspicion, fear and doubt. But in some (happy) cases when I’m able to bypass these, I see beginners takes these practices and leverage them in ways I only expect to see much farther down the line. so what am i talking about? Every programmer is given from time to time a task to change/fix sections of the code he is unfamiliar with. Over time I’ve noticed that there seem to be two basic approaches in this situation: Lets read and understand one approach taken by many when facing new code is to treat it as a text book to be understood. First the programmer will collect every piece of information he can get...

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Posted in: Engineering Practices,TDD