Avoid Unexpected Jolts With UAT

Posted on April 19, 2012 by

The caffeine in a morning cup of coffee can provide a much-needed and desirable jolt; but the jolt of hot coffee landing in your lap during a drive to  work is a different kind of jolt altogether – and one to be avoided. VMC’s Galen Erickson explains how User Acceptance Testing (UAT) can help provide users with software performance they expect while avoiding undesirable jolts to performance.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) involves participants who represent a variety of roles for a solution or software, which is why we call it “role based” validation. But, UAT is different from functional testing in another critical way also. UAT tests the solution throughout end-to-end workflow. In other words, with UAT, we’re not just looking at a “snapshot” of whether a particular chunk of code works as it should. We’re taking a holistic look at whether throughout the users’ work requirements, the software lets them work as they should. Workflow validation can enable discovery of potential issues between steps, between departments or between systems that wouldn’t be discovered in more isolated functional test cases. And, we discover these kinds of issues before the software is released.

Back to my car analogy, with a very simple comparison, think about the car’s cup holder. The factory inspector would only check to see if a cup holder has been installed and maybe whether a cup fits in it while the car sits there at the end of the production line.

In an end-to-end workflow scenario, though, our family’s dad – one of the roles – may want to drink his coffee throughout his hour-long commute. His “workflow” factors in all the varying conditions, from sitting in his driveway to changing speeds en route to putting the car in park at the office. Well, maybe his favorite coffee cup is tall and skinny, so the cup holder doesn’t grip it securely. If a rush-hour traffic jam requires him to slam on his brakes, he could end up with that cup of scalding coffee in his lap instead of the cup holder.

If the UAT included having the dad try out the cup holder throughout his entire commute, it would have failed UAT and allowed the development team to fix the issue before release.

Users don’t like being unexpectedly burned by new releases with issues that dampen productivity or performance. How do you ensure your solution offers enhancements every step of the way?

Contact Galen Erickson at GalenEr@vmc.com or call him at 877.393.8622.

Posted in Software Development and Testing, Project Management, Enterprise Collaboration, Consulting | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Focus On What Counts With SharePoint

Posted on April 17, 2012 by

On a hike, you zoom in with your camera to get a close-up shot of a deer. Then, you zoom out for a sweeping photo of the entire mountainside. From one vantage point, you capture two great views. VMC expert Keith Prunella discusses how SharePoint can also provide great insight easily through multiple dashboard views.

SharePoint provides a platform to develop multiple easy-to-use graphical dashboards that measure key performance indicators (KPI) and aggregate data into one place. Dashboards can go from a simple view, with information appropriate for high-level people, to more functional views, appropriate for team members on a project.

You don’t have to be at a computer to access that information. You can quickly view it on monitors and TVs, for instance. These displays can be placed in convenient, secure locations, such as conference rooms or corridors.

Developing multi-tier dashboards in SharePoint allows people from the executive level down to easily identify the current status or progress of a project or even the workload for an entire team or department. For example, if you’re offsite and don’t have access to your laptop, you could get a quick status update by checking a simple-view dashboard through your phone. And if you want more than a broad overview, a quick tap will lead to a more detailed dashboard.

The beauty of that is you can look at your project information in a lot of different ways, with minimal effort.

Being able to zoom in and zoom out on project status or progress can be invaluable to a business. How can multiple dashboards improve your company’s ability to stay focused at all levels?

Keith Prunella is a Solutions Architect at VMC Consulting. You can contact Keith at keithpr@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.

Posted in Enterprise Collaboration, Knowledge Management | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Contact Center Metrics: Resolve Matters

Posted on April 12, 2012 by

According to The Tortoise and the Hare, it’s not how you begin the race; it’s how you finish. Speed doesn’t ensure success. Instead, the tortoise’s strategy and resolve wins him the race. Here, VMC expert Ken Tebbetts gives us a lesson in contact center metrics and what really counts.

Typically, when people mention ‘metrics,’ they’re referring to speed-related aspects – speed of answer or handle time – but there’s an important difference between measuring ‘how fast’ versus ‘how well’ a customer is taken care of. If you don’t factor in the ‘how well’ by tracking things like first contact resolution (FCR), customer satisfaction (CSAT), or transfer rates, you could pay a big price in hidden costs – the ‘unintended consequences’ Andrew Vloedman mentioned in his posts.

High-volume contact centers like to be compensated on a pay-for-performance basis, where speed and volume mean greater dollars for the vendor. However, it encourages speeding through each customer interaction with little regard for customer resolution or satisfaction. This results in repeated calls, at unnecessary cost for the client. They often also use offshore agents as first point of contact to find out the nature of the call and ask verification questions, like your name, where you’re calling from and so on. These agents don’t have the knowledge or skills to resolve the issue, but it gets the call logged with a fast answer time. If you’ve ever called in for customer support, you’ve probably had a similar experience: You’re asked the same questions repeatedly and transferred several times before anyone starts actually trying to help you with your problem.

FCR is vital to customer satisfaction, but it’s also harder to measure than other metrics. We think FCR measurement is well worth the effort, but many contact centers downplay its importance – partly because it does take extra effort and expertise. Also, without good strategies and call management practices, a speed metrics focus tends to erode FCR and CSAT numbers – meaning they meet service level agreements at the expense of customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Attention to detail and genuine concern that leads to resolving a customer’s issue on the first call pays huge dividends. It spares a customer the frustration of calling back, improving the customer experience – and brand reputation and CSAT scores in turn – while reducing repeat calls. You can then handle this reduced overall volume with fewer, more qualified agents.

I’ve never been in a situation where providing excellent customer service negatively impeded our ability to hit the metrics. The right solution lets us provide an exceptional customer experience in the shortest amount of time.

In contact center operations, smart strategies and efficient call resolution pay off, allowing you to serve customers both quickly and well. What story do your metrics tell about how you’re doing to win customer loyalty and satisfaction?

Contact Ken Tebbetts at KennethT@vmc.com or by phone at 877.393.8622.

Posted in Customer Care | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How To Avoid Unsavory Software

Posted on April 10, 2012 by

Ever noticed how much better that microwave meal looks on the package than after you cook it? Yes, it will still take care of your hunger, but it’s surely not as appetizing as you expected. When we asked VMC’s Galen Erickson to explain User Acceptance Testing (UAT), he told us that expectations play an important role in it.

To start with a sort of textbook definition, User Acceptance Testing – UAT, we call it – is a structured, role based validation for software or solutions releases in which users determine whether the solution provides the performance within their end-to-end workflow that lets them work effectively to meet business objectives.

Sometimes people are unclear on how UAT is different than functional testing. First, it’s different because it’s role based. In UAT, testers don’t review the software; users do. If you’re a salesperson or an HR director, you evaluate the software in a structured way to determine whether it meets your needs in effectively performing your job-specific tasks. In functional testing, the tester is only looking at whether the code works as built and as required by the functional specs document.

Think of a car rolling off an assembly line. If that car were software, the final factory inspectors would be like our software testers. They make sure everything meets the specifications and that it works. For example, has the cup holder been installed? Do power and volume controls work on the stereo? The equivalent of our user participants in UAT would be a family, each member having a different role. One user of the car is the teenage son who will get to drive it on the weekends. He wants the stereo to ‘rock’ with enough bass to impress his friends. Our car inspector – the functional tester – only checked to make sure that the stereo turns on and off, up and down. It works, but if the son can’t crank it up without it sounding distorted, then it doesn’t work as he expected. It would pass in functional testing, but it wouldn’t pass in UAT.

That’s why we often differentiate the testing this way: Functional testing tests whether the software works; User Acceptance Testing determines whether it works as expected.

Users expect software to enhance their performance or productivity. Solutions that don’t meet their needs will be unappealing and hard for them to swallow. What are you doing to ensure your solution works as expected?

Contact Galen Erickson at GalenEr@vmc.com or call 877.393.8622.

Posted in Consulting, Enterprise Collaboration, Project Management, Software Development and Testing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Collaborative Innovation

Posted on April 5, 2012 by

Steve Jobs, co-founder and CEO of Apple once said, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.” In the dynamic world of software development, if you aren’t innovating, you’re being left behind. Big innovations are results of a series of ideas that are incrementally refined and molded together. Team leader Scott Bowen describes some of his experience on teams that have harnessed collaboration to drive the creative process.

Something that really helped me in my career was the realization that software development is a creative endeavor, not the industrial endeavor that much of the business world has used as a management method. The challenge then becomes how to create an environment that enables creativity while producing results. There is a lot of material out there about tools and methodologies to enable creative teams, but I’ve always been more interested in the human behaviors on these teams that I think really make them successful.

There’s a great book called ‘Group Genius’ by Keith Sawyer that talks about how innovation comes from a team, and not the singular “mad scientist” as is often portrayed. There is improvisation by the team that results in the creation of something that’s bigger and better than the individual parts. The book has many examples how companies have used the power of collaborative teams to solve big problems or make major breakthroughs in their business.

In our business, we’re challenged to solve problems quickly and to be innovative on demand. It’s the magic behind the work we do in software development through a process of collaborative innovation. We’ll start with either one or more ideas and build on those as a team. We test ideas often and get early feedback to learn from failures and gain momentum from successes.

Effective collaboration requires the right mix of personalities and a work environment that enables the natural exchange of ideas. Where possible, I get people out of cubes and offices and into functional, open workspaces that support emergent innovation. The interaction that takes place gets good ideas moving forward more quickly, while ideas that don’t stand up to deeper scrutiny are shelved before too much time is invested.

A collaborative team can foster innovation, which can jumpstart your company on the way to its next breakthrough. What have you done to foster collaboration on your team?

 Contact Scott Bowen by email at ScottJB@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.
Posted in Software Development and Testing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Making The Most Of Your Time

Posted on April 3, 2012 by

A truism in life is that we all have the same amount of time in each day. What we do with that time is what makes all the difference. We talked with development expert Scott Bowen about how to make the most of your time when you’re working on an development project with a pending release date.

“Sometimes customers are challenged in articulating what they want, and it’s easy to have teams misinterpret customers’ wishes. In Scrum you prioritize the highest-level features (user stories), work on those, and at the end of the cycle, you have something to demonstrate to a customer and get concrete feedback. Wasted effort is minimized, and rework is reduced. Also, as you continue on, you start to learn more about the unwritten requirements that the customer may have that would not otherwise surface in a requirements specification documentation session. With Scrum, you can more quickly adapt a product to meet the true needs of the customer.

I worked with a customer who was adopting Scrum. They worked, very much, in a waterfall environment before. We asked them why they were changing. The development manager told us, ‘I want my people to focus less on all that upfront documentation and start building some code. If we don’t use Scrum, we’ll still be here a year later arguing over the functional specifications and requirements, without a single line of code written.’

The ultimate goal is hitting your product release date. It’s very likely that things are going to change between now and the release date. The idea is that as you near that release date, and there are certain features or user stories that won’t be ready, they are lower priority because you continuously prioritize and work on the highest priority stories, delivering and getting early feedback on the highest-priority functionality. This allows you to deliver a product that is valuable to your customer.”

Lee Iacocca, the well known business leader who turned around Chrysler in the 1980s, said, “If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.” How do you prioritize your time to make the most of your development efforts?

Contact Scott Bowen by email at ScottJB@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.

Posted in Software Development and Testing | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

What’s Your Data Worth?

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

There’s an old saying that you don’t know what you’ve lost until it’s gone. That is especially true with data. We talked with data center veteran Chuck Hobart to get his perspective on the value of data.

“Some of the work I’ve done for Wall Street facilities included trading desk servers, which process, on average, a few million dollars a minute. On volatile days, that number can climb to $3 to $4 million dollars a second. If a server goes down during trading hours, money is lost, since trades can’t be made. Server reliability and availability is imperative. A failed server can put a firm at serious risk, even if it’s just a few seconds. During a catastrophe like 9-11, besides the loss of lives, which is immeasurable, of course, the loss of data can be a loss of greater magnitude than the loss of property.

That’s why today’s standards call for approximately 99.999% up time, or “five nines,” for a tier 4 data center, which equals about three minutes of downtime a year. In reality, that’s spread across multiple years. You might have the data center up and running for three to four years and have half an hour of downtime in the fifth year, depending on various conditions.

Of all the outages in data centers around the world, more than 50% of them are caused by people. Because of this, there has been a push for the last 10 years to create a “lights out data center,” which is a facility where no one goes into the building. Instead, it is purely accessible from the outside. It’s doubtful that such a facility can be operational from a practical perspective, because anything electronic or that has moving parts will eventually wear out. You have to have people running a data center, which can create the operational issues. It would make sense to have those people well trained and skilled at responding to critical issues.”

Your data is valuable. How valuable it is depends on how you use it, and how much you will lose without it. What is your plan to protect your data, and perhaps, the value of your entire organization, in the process?

 Contact Chuck Hobart by email at ChuckH@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.
Posted in Data Centers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

A Good Look At The Big Picture Of Service Desk Performance

Posted on March 27, 2012 by

It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Taking a look at the big picture of how your service desk functions can really improve performance, as Andrew Vloedman explains.

“To outsource a customer’s service desk, it is crucial to consider the big picture of what they currently have in place with an assessment. We extract as much data as possible to help provide statistics to build the picture.

First, volume is broken down to determine call arrival patterns (interval, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly), so we can determine average handle time, first call resolution, average time to dispatch, and average time to resolve. We also look at desk level performance, looking at the percentage of calls that go unanswered, the average speed of answer and the percentage of calls that are answered in 30, 60, and 90 seconds. This data helps us determine the basic headcount required to successfully handle the volume.

Next we look at the products that are being supported and at what level. This includes finding out if we will support off the shelf applications at only the first level, support custom applications, or take on Level II support. The answers to these questions help us get a clear picture of the skill sets needed to successfully support the client.

Once we have the basic information and desk level data, we can apply it to the client’s performance goals or expectations for the desk. Depending on the criteria (percentages of calls answered in the determined timeframe and a limit of calls abandoned), we can determine the correct headcount and schedule to meet these targets. This allows the client to see the overall financial impact at each level of performance.

To continue to build the picture’s composition, we have a technical interview with the desk’s manager to get more information about the business drivers at the desk level. Questions we ask include:

•What does the knowledge base look like and how complete is it (if they have one)?

•What is their current IT solution, what tools are they using?

•Are there robust and defined processes and procedures to follow?

•Do they have routing tools and routing matrixes?

•What is their management to agent ratio?

•What is the average call per end user?

•How many end users are there?

Not all of these answers may be available, especially with a less defined or less mature internal service desk, but any of this additional data we can gather helps us further round out the picture. It’s valuable information to have even if you are not outsourcing; but it is critical if you do want to build a strong outsourcing solution.”

Once you see the big picture, you can make better decisions to improve your service desk. Have you taken a look at your service desk’s big picture?

Contact Andrew Vloedman by email at AndrewVl@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.

Posted in Customer Care | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Replacing a Perfectly Good Lightbulb

Posted on March 22, 2012 by

Have you ever gone to change a light bulb and discovered that it just needed to be tightened, not changed? Sometimes when you try to enhance SharePoint, the situation is similar, explains enterprise collaboration specialist Stephen Crabtree.

“There are many applications that you can add to SharePoint. The key things to look for in an application are:

•Is it cost effective for your organization?

•Will it improve the bottom line?

•Will it enhance design capabilities?

•Will it enhance your workflow?

•Will it improve communication and processes within your company?

Then, you really need to consider how an application will affect every department within your organization from human resources to finance, IT, marketing, and any other department specific to your business. Each department can use SharePoint in very different ways. Plus, in many cases, both teams and the applications will need to synch up well.

What I’ve typically found is that when a customer adds onto their SharePoint product, they find out more of what their current limitations are. Sometimes they find that their workflows aren’t quite as enhanced as they should be, or if they upgraded from SharePoint 2007 to the 2010 release, it’s missing metadata that would give them far better searching capabilities. The 2010 release also has an improved disaster recovery system built into it, as well as persistent links to files. The linking feature is a major improvement, because it allows the URLs that are set up in SharePoint to stay consistent so you can easily return to them.

Sometimes when an organization gets to this point, they realize that all that was really needed was improving their current tool or an upgrade to the latest release. Bringing in an expert to help discover the strengths and weaknesses can help you not have to go through the expense of adding-on, while still greatly improving your collaboration tool.”

If your SharePoint installation is like a flickering light bulb, how are you going to tighten it?

Posted in Enterprise Collaboration | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Right Tools for the Job

Posted on March 21, 2012 by

When you want a spiral staircase built, you need an artisan with a full complement of appropriate tools. Great tools in the hands of a novice will not give you a beautiful and structurally sound staircase. Conversely, a master carpenter would struggle without appropriate tools. The appropriate tools and skilled experts are necessary for a top notch service desk, as well. Service desk expert Andrew Vloedman talks about why outsourcing your customer care or service desk operations can be beneficial.

“We’ve assembled a collection of state-of-the-art industry tools that allow us to measure and manage almost every aspect of a contact center or service desk. These tools give us the ability to provide custom reporting solutions to our customers. Using these solutions, we can analyze performance and identify opportunities for improvement that most likely would be invisible to providers without such extensive tool belts.

Often, when we conduct service desk assessments, we find significant gaps in data collection. The daily volume may be provided, but in many cases it has not been broken down by interval or by call type. All too often the assessment is hindered by a deficient set of tools. What we offer is taking that limited view and opening it up by the addition of industry-leading work force management tools (WFM), CRMs, integrated knowledge bases and quality management tools. These tools paint a clearer picture of what’s happening on your service desk or contact center at a granular level. They provide crucial information that, when placed in the hands of our industry leading operations team, give our customers both the tools and artisans to build a world-class service desk.

Many times we find that companies have one, but not the other. They have solid tools, but lack the ability or experience to leverage those tools to get useable information; or they have talented management but lack solid tools to give them sufficient insight. Buying these tools or finding available industry leaders can be very expensive, and is often a hit or miss proposition. An experienced and well-equipped consultant like VMC has the tools and the proven talent on hand.

Tools are a critical consideration in outsourcing your service desk. Having the skilled artisans who best use the tools and interpret the data that those tools provide should be a deciding factor when choosing an outsourcing partner.”

You want to be sure you have the right experts with the proper tools to make the most of your efforts. What do you look for in an outsourcing partner?

Contact Andrew Vloedman by email at AndrewVl@vmc.com or 877.393.8622.
Posted in Customer Care | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment