Beyond Customer Service: Ownership in Software Development Services - Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog, we covered a few ways LiveSwitch Inc. solves challenges that pop up during projects by always fully investigating the issues at hand. In this conclusion piece, we’re describing how we work after we figure out your application’s pain points. Once we have the necessary information, this is how we create your ideal application.

Solutioning

Now you have a challenge, and you now understand the problem fully. Excellent. Now how do we take that knowledge and apply it to resolving the underlying issue? At LiveSwitch Inc., this is a team effort. We have solution experts that have been developing/managing/resolving problems for years, and a brainstorm with them and others often leads to a variety of possible solutions to the problem. Group brainstorming of not just the solution, but related issues and problems that are known that can be resolved simultaneously with any solution provided are all thrown on the table for consideration.

In the case of our connection issue from Part 1, the issue wasn’t immediately obvious and needed more tests. We determined that we had to get on the T-mobile network to track this down. This was problematic, seeing as we’re located in Canada. Our solution? Send an engineer into the states with a T-mobile phone, and work the problem from there. That’s true ownership!

For the project timeline question from Part 1, after realizing the importance of the demo, we wanted to figure out if we actually could shift the deadline and make the project happen further. Something had to give, but after some discussions, we realized that the demo only required a specific subset of functionality. So with just two “whys” and a little solutioning, we were able to determine that by simply re-prioritizing a few items in our schedule, we could hit the target deadline without impacting cost or changing the total effort involved. Nice!

Download the professional services solutions sheet to find the service package that is right for your application.

Seeing it Through

So you’ve learned about a problem. You’ve dug in and understood the underlying issue. You’ve even gone through and found a solution. Now it’s time to drive it home. Implementation and communication are key to completing the challenge. It’s easy to get one of these and not the other, but both are critical.

First, communication.

Sharing what’s going on is just as important as the solution implementation. Depending on the size of your organization, this can include informing project managers to determine schedule impact and release planning, product owners for signoff and potential side effects, customer service to improve support, technical architects for review and integration signoff, and even senior management if the issue is critical enough.

Second, implementation.

Without the implementation stage, obviously nothing will get fixed, and the problem will linger. The implementation could be small or large, may need to be broken down further, and could even end up being deferred for quite some time if the determined impact is small, but even a deferred implementation needs to be executed on, if for nothing else than to thoroughly document the problem for the future.

That’s what true ownership means here at LiveSwitch Inc.. What does it mean to your team?