CX Articles
How a ‘Bucket of Hours’ Can Benefit Your Software Product Maintenance Plan
Why are we talking about software product maintenance plans? Maybe you just launched your latest killer app. Or maybe you have legacy software that it hasn’t stood the test of time. Wherever you are on the spectrum of very old to very new software, you would benefit from having a software product maintenance plan. Software […]
BizOps at SEP
You may have heard of BizOps as a business function, but there’s a good chance you aren’t sure exactly what that looks like day-to-day, or specifically how that plays out at a custom software consultancy like SEP. This post will give you a glimpse into what BizOps looks like for us. The History of BizOps […]
Inviting Clients Into Our Slack Workspace
At SEP, we design and develop software products for our customers. Our ability to do that well is founded on solid technical practices. To take it to the next level, however, we need to be able to seamlessly collaborate with our clients. Over the past few years, we’ve started inviting our clients into our Slack […]
Diagnose, Deliver, Delight
Burger King used to have a marketing campaign for “Have It Your Way”. For a restaurant setting, it’s nice to be able to customize the normal menu for our tastes. But what does “Have It Your Way” really mean for our software clients? What’s on the menu for a successful project? Diagnose the Problem When […]
You Won’t Know, If You Never Ask…
I was recently copied on an email thread where some requirements were discussed between a project lead (Bob) and the client (Fred).(FYI – the names are made up) Bob asked Fred about a specific requirement that read (paraphrased): The Error Indicator should display every 60 seconds. My next task was to add this indicator (the […]
Spec Driven Versus Client Satisfaction in Outsourcing
Chris Shinkle introduced us to the Kano model of customer satisfaction while internally presenting his Stop Doing Kanban, Start Learning lecture that he delivered at this year’s LSSC. The Kano Model of Customer Satisfaction: As an outsourcing partner, this model has direct implications for SEP. The Performance axis represents our client’s needs in a solution. […]
Deconstructing “always” and “never”
How many times has a statement (requirement) like one of the following been given to you? (only to find out months later that there is an important exception that was not given to you): Field X will always be a positive integer! (except for the case where we decided long ago to populate it with […]
Client Tenure – Dealing with clients for the long haul
I’m in a fairly unique position here at SEP. For the last seven years (out of the ten I’ve been here), I’ve worked almost exclusively on a series of related projects for the same client. When I say client, in reality I’m talking about the company since the individuals that I’ve dealt with have changed […]