Do not stop making mistakes!
Today one of my team members comes to me and tell me that the report we are sending by email to our users starting from this month is not stable. The figures are bullshit and users complained about it. In deed I checked myself this morning (actually a user contacted me to tell me that) and I could see a gap of 10% between the figures in the report and the figures in our Point Of Sales system. The figures in the POS systems are the right one.
It took me 2 hours to convince him that he was completely wrong, but I did it. Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong, but he didn’t convinced me of the contrary. Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, here in Japan or at least in my organization, in front of any bug or defect, the usual reaction is to stop the operations or projects, until… until forever.
He tells me that he absolutely want to stop sending this bullshit report to all users. It ruins the reporting tool’s image which is already quite bad. When the figures will be fixed, he would accept to send it again by mail. Until then he prefers the users to log on the system and check the reports instead of receiving such a bad report by mail and be forced to see wrong data.
He have a good reason to stop sending his report. Users don’t like it! And I don’t even care the reason. Yes, users don’t like it and therefore we have to improve it, but stopping the sending won’t help us to improve it, on the contrary. If they don’t like it they won’t log on the system to check the accuracy of the data, they will just ignore it and tell us “fix it and then, we will go…”. But everytime we will ask them to start using it they will give as a pretext a new bug we didn’t here about until now that would forbid the usage of it and we will lose time again to fix and convince them to check it, but they will come up with this argument: “You never provided us something we needed! We are sure to find bugs in your reports even though we already checked once, so we don’t even want to check it again! We have to focus on our own work!”
We failed hundreds of implementation in my department because of this way of doing.
I suggested him a new method. Just keep sending the report, the worst the better! I received this morning for the first sending, only one comment but he received several, meaning several bugs to fix. Lets keep this report in front of their eyes as long as possible so that we can identify everything that need to be improved. Meanwhile we get to learn everything that is important for them. Where are they looking in our gigantic tables? What are the key figures? and so on…
The report gives a bad image to the reporting tool ? I strongly disagree ! We give a bad image of this tool and of ourselves. We provide them a tool that they need to perform their tasks. But we don’t have a clue about their tasks. The tool is not adapted and they resent having to use it. Every time we provide a new report template that has been suggested by other countries, specifically in Japan, we know that they won’t use it, they don’t even want to try it. They stick to the POS database old fashion data download in Excel to build their report from scratch.
Sending our “unadapted” report right in front on their face every morning will force them to force us to improve it. For every comment, I suggest him to thank the user and try to identify how to fix the bug, We will come back to them when we’ll find a solution. Meanwhile we gather information about what they need and learn how to provide it. The main issue is only the relationship we have with them.
Keep doing mistakes, to have people help you to improve yourself so that you can provide them what they need. It’s a win-win process. They might resent to work with you, but if you don’t proceed like this, you won’t improve yourself anyway and be useless sooner than you thought. The risk of being considered unskilled because of showing to your colleagues a work that doesn’t satisfy them 100%, is lower that the absolute certainty of getting unskilled if you hide all works that are not 100% correct. There is nothing that can be 100% correct. Ask questions and make sure to learn something from the answer, even if they add at the end of they explanations “… you idiot”…
Tags: Buiness, Management