Is Research So Bad?
Yet another pointless rant.
What ever happened to good old fashioned research? If something's wrong, shouldn't you look into all possibilities before running off to someone else to fix it?
Now, I admit, I'm your quintessential stereotypical girl in a lot of aspects, and occasionally (or maybe more than occasionally) I'll run to someone else to find the answer if I don't find it right away. The point is, though, I do try to find the answer first.
We had a client today whose website didn't work quite the way it should have. So the other developers and I pulled our hair out to find the problem, found it, and pulled our hair out to determine if it was our problem, or our client's problem. Of course, the particular employee that we need to speak to at our client's office is out today. Why shouldn't she be? It's a nice, Friday afternoon, and we have a problem with their website.
Later in the afternoon, we got another email forwarded to us from that client. One of their clients who uses the site was getting frustrated with the misrepresentation of their information, and she listed specifically an issue with her account. So we looked at her account, and found out the problem (in this case anyway) wasn't on our end, but on our client's end. And not only did this mistake affect this one person, it just so happened to affect every single person who uses this website. So while we cut off access to the website for this particular account, this particular error affects all the accounts, not just this one.
And you know what? When we identified the problem and called our client, he had already left for the day, too. I do have the access to fix this error, but it was pointed out to me that we just store the data, we don't manipulate the data. If we go manipulating data without the client's permission first (even though we know it to be a gross error), then that is a breach of contract.
What sucks is that our client's clients are going to raise a fuss, and our client is going to say it is our fault that someone on their staff can't input data correctly. And this is a typing error that the site we designed for them can't fix. Well, it could, but it's really unreasonable to ask it to do it.
Are you thoroughly confused yet? Anyway, the whole point is, this particular error could have been resolved rather quickly if our client had done a little research into the problem before responding to his client that the website has some known issues that are being looked into and then forwarding the email on to us. Yes, we do have some known issues, and we are looking into them, but this particular issue is only resolvable by them, not us.
Grr...
What ever happened to good old fashioned research? If something's wrong, shouldn't you look into all possibilities before running off to someone else to fix it?
Now, I admit, I'm your quintessential stereotypical girl in a lot of aspects, and occasionally (or maybe more than occasionally) I'll run to someone else to find the answer if I don't find it right away. The point is, though, I do try to find the answer first.
We had a client today whose website didn't work quite the way it should have. So the other developers and I pulled our hair out to find the problem, found it, and pulled our hair out to determine if it was our problem, or our client's problem. Of course, the particular employee that we need to speak to at our client's office is out today. Why shouldn't she be? It's a nice, Friday afternoon, and we have a problem with their website.
Later in the afternoon, we got another email forwarded to us from that client. One of their clients who uses the site was getting frustrated with the misrepresentation of their information, and she listed specifically an issue with her account. So we looked at her account, and found out the problem (in this case anyway) wasn't on our end, but on our client's end. And not only did this mistake affect this one person, it just so happened to affect every single person who uses this website. So while we cut off access to the website for this particular account, this particular error affects all the accounts, not just this one.
And you know what? When we identified the problem and called our client, he had already left for the day, too. I do have the access to fix this error, but it was pointed out to me that we just store the data, we don't manipulate the data. If we go manipulating data without the client's permission first (even though we know it to be a gross error), then that is a breach of contract.
What sucks is that our client's clients are going to raise a fuss, and our client is going to say it is our fault that someone on their staff can't input data correctly. And this is a typing error that the site we designed for them can't fix. Well, it could, but it's really unreasonable to ask it to do it.
Are you thoroughly confused yet? Anyway, the whole point is, this particular error could have been resolved rather quickly if our client had done a little research into the problem before responding to his client that the website has some known issues that are being looked into and then forwarding the email on to us. Yes, we do have some known issues, and we are looking into them, but this particular issue is only resolvable by them, not us.
Grr...
posted by Pami @ 5:27 PM
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