The Image of IT
So here’s the deal. I’m a developer at an insurance company. We are two full time developers, one full time report writer and then our manager develops whenever he has the time. Now we trying to get a new policy in place whereby users are not just allowed to call us directly. They have to make use of a system called SysAid. Now for those of you that don’t what sysAid is, basically its a small app on which users can log help requests that then gets sent to us. Now that we starting to enforce the use of SysAid a lot of the users are no longer happy.
Whereas they used to phone and whatever was done over the phone, they now need to “pick a number and wait” so that we go through the requests in the order in which we get them. A lot of the users are now complaining that we aren’t working. Which naturally is a load of crap, but we have to now “improve the image of IT in the company”. How the hell do you improve the “image” of a department? out of our approx 250 users in the company, maybe 5 understand what does into effecting a change on a system. Besides maintaining various system we need to develop and maintain more systems!
Here’s typical query: We have two buttons on a form, one says Calculate A and the other says Calculate B. People call us and get all upset because they trying to calculate B and they are in fact clicking Calculate A! Any developer here would laugh at it the first time it happens. but when you deal with problems such as this all day is begins to take its toll! So not only has your train of thought been interrupted by an irate user BUT you now have to spend 5minutes helping them. The second problem we have is people randomly walking into our office for help. Again, 5 - 10 minutes helping them and your train of thought is gone. Now that we enforcing the rule of making use of SysAid, which rocks just BTW, everyone is getting really upset.
How would you improve the “image” of the IT department? Do we throw little parties after work and show them that “we are just like them”? How would you “portray” the amount of work done to different sets of users? We’ve come up blank on this!
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The bad news is that you can’t. The simple reality is that the users were used to an immediate feedback, and now they’re not getting it. What you’re doing is the right thing, but it will NEVER seem like that to the users.
All the advantages they will get in terms of more productivity out of the developers are deferred gratification that they don’t see any direct immediate impact for.
PS. As for the Calculate A/B mistake. If users are making the mistake regularly, then IMHO it’s a bug in your app. Admittedly it’s a UI/Training bug, but a bug nonetheless.
I would say the IT department shouldn’t have an image. I would also say that users on a system should never be contending for developers time. My thoughts would be, hire a helpdesk guy/gal who then uses SysAid to pass on anything they can’t handle.
Thanks for the comments.
Referring to your last comment Sean, we have a “Calculate Household” and “Calculate Vehicle” buttons. The users use the Calculate Vehicle 9 times out of 10 so when the odd household does come around then then click Calculate Vehicle out of habit.
The problem is the users not reading!
Not sure how realistic my suggestions are but they seem simple enough: When the UI displays the result of the calculation, preface the the result with an explanation of the result. Instead of “the result is x” or just displaying “X”, change it to: “You speciefied ‘Calculate A’; the result of this calculation is X”. If these are simple calculations that aren’t too resource intensive to generate, why not remove the buttons and just provide the user with the result of both calculations, clearly labeling what each value means.
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