Tuesday, May 30, 2006

Broken customer service / software systems

Joel on Software:
"One of the hallmarks of a broken system is when there's just no possible way that the programmer who is writing code that talks to customers can ever get feedback from those customers about bugs, because the call center is outsourced to a different company than the software development project is outsourced to. Everyone is trying their hardest to do their job but management has set it up so that it's impossible."
True dat, Joel!

Sunday, May 28, 2006

Glad to see they finally fixed THAT in Vista...

Uh, maybe it's not fixed yet.

Friday, May 26, 2006

"We have armies of people whose only job is to handle exceptions..."

Collaboration Consultant [Mike Jones, London] writes:
"I remember a colleague in and consultancy group that I used to work for telling me some enormous percentage of calls to call centres (or is the correct phrase “contact centres” now) are because something has gone wrong. However, they rarely are logged as “complaints” they are just handled. We have armies of people whose only job is to deal with exceptions that if they were captured in a coherent manner could probably be dealt with to stop everyone else suffering the same fate. Of course if you product or company is so dire that it can’t change in response to issues you might as well just give up now!"
Ouch!

Of course this explains why the service desk is no good at providing useful data about the exceptions they encounter - if we were able to identify and fix the exceptions, they would not have anything to do, so we'd pay them less $$$. Yet another reason why outsourcing your support organization can be a non-optimized solution.

Forthcoming: more value creation exercises - (practical thingamy example #2)

Value here - just like the last example - should be an approximate combination of:
- Technology knowledge.
- Client knowledge.
- Constraints knowledge (culture, laws, regulations).
- Practical solutions knowledge.
- Easy matching of the above.
- Seamless execution."


Yeah.

Thursday, May 25, 2006

My Guitar Hero 2 wishlist

So the first songs for Guitar Hero 2 are starting to be announced. Here's my wishlist for others:

Stone in Love - Journey
Always With Me, Always With You - Joe Satriani
Back in Black - AC/DC
Owner of a Lonely Heart - Yes
Play Guitar - John Mellencamp
Are You Gonna Go My Way - Lenny Kravitz
Every Day is a Winding Road - Sheryl Crow
Free Fallin' - Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
Healing Bones - Jules Shear
Walk on the Wild Side - Lou Reed (the bassline, of course)
Where the Streets Have No Name - U2
Gun - Uncle Tupelo

As a bonus, here's the lyrics to Play Guitar.

Saturday, May 20, 2006

Z Rocket 4

The Z rocket 4 has twice as much power as the Z rocket 3, the Z rocket 2, and the the Z rocket 1 has. It can do all the things those Z rockets do but it is the fastest Z rocket ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker aged four and a half.

Z Rocket 3

Another guest post dictated by Zeb:

It has 42 million thousand million bazillion trillion million billion trillion billion million trillian million trillian hundred I mean hundred hundred forty-two twenty and twenty-four more times than Z Rocket 2 does and Z Rocket 1 does (both together). And it has all the stuff that Z Rocket 1 and Z Rocket 2 does but it has more power than any of the rockets ever designed by Zebediah Scott Becker age four and a half.

Friday, May 19, 2006

Z-Rocket, Mark II

More guest blogging from Zeb:

This is liike a regular z rocket but it has a few changes.

it has 6600, million thousand more times power than the regular z rocket does. and it also has windshield wipers. And it has a kind of material ceramic engine booster rockets that won't get affected forever when that type of z rocket wins a race against teh z rocket because um that z rocket has twice that much power. The other type of z rocket against the z rocket. That sure is a lot of power, papa!

Designed by Zebediah Scott Becker, 4 1/2 years old.

(He dictated the whole thing, including the sign-off line.)

Saturday, May 13, 2006

Cloud Cult

I was just listening to "6 Days". Yummy! (Several tracks, including that one, are available for free download on their website.)