What ever happened to Tandem and NonStop OS 2002

(Eric Chomko) writes:

Congratulations. At least you use the word "lucky". Many of us aren't so lucky.

Again, you've been lucky in having a management team that's willing to run interference for you. I've been in such a situation too, and it's wonderful. But in some workplaces management just imposes another layer of obfuscation and pbuttes the poo through, while adding some poo of their own.

Again, nice work if you can get it. I remember the first time I got to sit down with a customer and discuss things without any intermediaries. It was amazing how much we cleared up. But many organizations don't permit this.

I'm not saying that it's utterly impossible for something to work the first time. But if I were a gambling man that's not the way I'd bet.

Believe me, if something works the first time I'm delighted to let it be and get on to something else. I like it so much, in fact, that I'm constantly trying to raise the quality of my work to increase the probability of it happening. But systems and requirements are sufficiently complex that it's unlikely that someone hasn't missed something somewhere.

And that includes the customer - I can't count the number of times we've surprised a customer by pointing out a possible series of events that they haven't foreseen. One thing I learned long ago is to demand a clear description of what to do in such a situation. At the very top of my list of Famous Last Words is: "Oh, don't worry about that - it'll never happen." In my experience, "never" is usually about six months - and if we're not ready for it, then things will break and it'll be seen as our fault.

Timely? Not if I'm spending my time teaching the customer things he should already know. Yes, I know that old saw about "If the student failed to learn, the instructor failed to teach." But my job is not to teach a customer how to do his work - it's to provide him with tools to let him work. Yes, we provide training in using the tools, and try to make the tools easy to use. But if a customer doesn't understand the finer details of his own work, it's not my job to teach them to him. Indeed, it's up to him to explain them to me so I can make my software work for him. That's where I should be spending my time.

That's our criterion too. But you apparently haven't encountered the level of nit-picking that we have. Some customers care more about how a report heading is centered than about the numbers themselves. We don't have time to sit with such people and explain what's wrong with that, and it probably wouldn't do any good anyway. "Perfection" can take on quite a nightmarish aspect in an environment like that.

Where on earth did I say that? We are constantly improving things - often with the help of feedback from customers.

That's right. But you have to know when to say, "This will do for now, we'll make it better next month." You can't get it all exactly right the first time - especially if you're trying to get something out before your window of opportunity closes.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. Our software is improving constantly, often with help from suggestions by others. Yes, we sometimes have to point out why a suggestion isn't feasible. Just because some customer thinks that it would be nice to process every 17th record backwards on alternate Wednesdays depending on the phase of the moon, that doesn't mean that we should spend all of our time trying to do it - especially if it would mess up a hundred other customers who like things the way they are. Besides, we're too busy trying to cope with the ever-changing weirdness of input data provided to us by vendors who are totally inflexible.

Whatever it is that we're doing, it seems to be working. Our happy customers outnumber our disgruntled ones, our disgruntled ones are being gruntled as quickly as possible, and we're making a living. When you get right down to it, that's not too bad.

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