“The page is getting stuck. I can’t move to the next step.”
A field service rep sent that. It landed on the project team and the transformation owner. The end customer’s work order was blocked.
My first thought was that the end user wasn’t trained.
A couple of weeks
The message came very close to the start of the release. Again, we thought it was a training issue.
The process was running long. It was throwing an error in the background. That slowed the page down. It was intermittent, so it was hard to get a handle on.
It took a couple of weeks.
A developer got frustrated with the complaints. She decided to dig in. She set aside her regular work and spent time investigating what was actually going on.
The cleanup
She told me what she found. I said, “Well, looks like we gotta fix it. Is it fixed? Do you need more time? What’s the impact? Is there any data that was lost? Have we been doing a manual workaround?”
The business went back to a manual process. They were following up with customers manually.
Then the cleanup. They had to look at the data. They had to make sure there were no double work orders. They calculated revenue to make sure the numbers ticked and tied.
After a release, there’s a whole bunch of cleanup. That work ends up taking a month.
Stuff will slip by
It happens all the time. The question goes back to testing. We need better testing.
Maybe. That’s not the point.
Stuff will slip by.
She stayed late
She had set aside her regular work to find it. The work got done. She stayed late.
I still think the user is not doing it right.
For teams still cleaning up weeks after a release. Kosmos offers a complimentary Investigation Cost Audit. Forty-five minutes. We look at how many issues a release produced and how severe each one was. You leave with a one-page scorecard.