Both flexibility and hard work to satisfy customers

-- This article is based on my speech on 2011-9-10qclub Dalian. --

The IT industry is a kind of service industry. As a member of the Service Industry, IT personnel aim to satisfy customers. The customers mentioned here may be internal business users of the company, it may also be external business staff, but in any case, our goal should be consistent.

What can we do to satisfy our customers? Using a predecessor, he was explaining what kind of software products or systems could be easily sold. "There are two features: one is to help customers save time, one is to help customers save money. If the two products can reach one, even if they are qualified, if they can all be achieved, they will not be sold." Similarly, if we want our own services to satisfy our business users, we should also achieve the above purpose-saving money and saving time. If our services can help business users and companies make more money, then our services will be upgraded, and we should be able to achieve it through the advantages of artificial intelligence.

However, the above is just our ideal, and there is often a big gap between it and reality. In many cases, business personnel do not think it can help them save money and save time, you don't need to raise money. They think that the IT department is a department that burns money. Every year, the software system will spend a lot of money, but it cannot bring about many substantial changes, and even cannot well support the business. Even more bluntly, it is a waste of money.

Even though it staff, especially sales engineers, will tell people in the business department that IT systems can help you save costs, you can see that you have to print a lot of things before signing, now we can help you achieve paperless office, which can save a lot of printing costs. It can also improve work efficiency. How fast do you want your computer to count? Computers are always better than the human brain.

However, after the business personnel have gone through various systems, they do not think that the above words are a lot of lies. Why? There are the following problems:

• Many demand changes cannot be met
• Input is troublesome and cannot be copied and pasted in bulk, wasting more time
• BecauseProgramFaults occur frequently due to various causes such as bug, network, and power supply. In addition, problems may cause great losses.
• Not flexible enough. Many operations that are easy to implement in actual business cannot be implemented due to system restrictions.

Indeed, the software system has the above problems for various reasons. As a programmer, we should start from me and improve our own capabilities to better satisfy our business users. Next, let's describe how to improve satisfaction from the soft and hard capabilities.

Soft Capability

When it comes to soft capabilities, many programmers may think that it is important not to have technical capabilities. However, I think this capability is an important condition in some cases to ensure that we can satisfy our customers, without these capabilities, we cannot even know where customers are not satisfied, why are we not satisfied, how can we make them satisfied, and where can we talk about improving satisfaction?

Communication skills

In fact, communication and communication skills are very important in any work process, especially for programmers who can access end users.

However, before communication, or during communication, we should try our best to become friends with customers, because only after we become friends can we communicate better.

This requires us to correct our position first. In many cases, as programmers, they should have at least a good degree and master high-tech knowledge. Inevitably, some programmers will feel that they are superior, business users, especially sales personnel in general enterprises, may not have such a high degree of education, and the computer knowledge is not particularly rich. However, they also have things we don't know. They must have our teachers. In communication, they are also our teachers. If they reject people thousands of miles away, there is no communication at all.

Next, if we want to become friends, we can start from the details. For a person, the most important thing is simple: first, name, and second, birthday. If we can remember a person's name clearly, in addition, you can call it out accurately at the next meeting, which will surely win your favor. If you can send a blessing on your birthday, it will bring unexpected results. To achieve these two points, we don't need to pay too much, just pay attention. Another detail is to understand the interests and interests of business users. If there is a coincidence with your own, you can often discuss it. It is also a good way to enhance friendship.

There are many communication methods, such:

• Face-to-face communication
• Phone number
• Instant Messaging Tools (Messager, QQ, Gtalk, etc)
• Email

I personally think that the first two methods will be preferred, which will produce better communication effects and higher communication efficiency. These two methods are more direct, while the other two methods lead to more misunderstandings and ambiguities due to distance.

Analysis capability

There are three philosophical steps to deal with a problem, that is, to discover, analyze, and solve the problem. Therefore, we can see that, in fact, the analysis of the problem is a step from the beginning, the role is also very obvious. To improve the analysis capability and analyze the problem clearly is definitely a necessary condition for solving the problem.

Here, I would like to recommend a series of books, such as Mr. autonavi's "goal", which tells us that when we analyze the problem, we should adjust it in a timely manner based on the changes in the situation, constantly looking for bottlenecks in the process is actually the key point of the problem. After finding the bottleneck, you can use a certain method to solve it. However, it is not a matter of success after solving the bottleneck, after a bottleneck is solved, the bottleneck of the entire process will be transferred to another place and we must adjust it.

In addition, I often use the mind map in the process of analyzing problems. From understanding this tool to now, I have formed a habit, every time I analyze the problem, I will unconsciously take out a blank sheet of paper and write and draw on it with a pen.

Learning Ability

The current knowledge is constantly updated, so learning is very necessary for us who want to solve the problem. To solve business problems, you must learn the professional knowledge in the business field. This does not mean that IT-related professional knowledge is not important, but it wants to better understand business problems and provide solutions for business users, it is very important to master the knowledge in the business field.

One way to learn that knowledge is to read books, but another more effective way is to communicate with business users and integrate them into the business team even if conditions permit, work with them within a period of time. The experience gained in this way will be very valuable, and it is definitely the first hand. In addition, this is very helpful for us to change our thinking perspective and truly think about problems from the perspective of business users.

There is an IT architecture in the IT system, or a system architecture in the software system. There is also a business architecture in the business field. Only the two can perfectly fit, the IT system can better serve the business, thus more conducive to the development of business departments.

Hard capability

In addition to the above soft capabilities, we also need to add hard capabilities, that is, technical capabilities, to implement solutions to solve business problems. For programmers, this capability mainly refers to languages and tools. However, we should not only learn these knowledge, but also learn their advantages and disadvantages to use them to solve problems. As the saying goes, what we need to do is to learn from each other.

Use appropriate languages and tools

In the process of software development, there will be some specifications and restrictions for each project, but for some specific tool programs, or the kind of small programs that are throwing, we can use some methods that are not available in the general development process, so that we can get twice the result with half the effort.

For example, during the development of large projects, we generally do not use Chinese as the variable name, it is very difficult to get a proper English name for it, and those words may not be recognized after a while, so many variable names in it use Chinese, this makes development and subsequent maintenance very convenient.

Although some methods that are usually unavailable in those programs can be used at will, it does not mean that you can not pay attention to them.CodeSpecifications, such as indentation and naming rules. If the code format is messy, the maintainability of the code will be poor, and those problems should be the most basic qualities of programmers. In any program, even in a trivial program, you must take it seriously.

In addition, some uncommon languages and tools can be used as needed. During project development, many things only need temporary maintenance. For those programs, the most important thing is the development time. If you try to submit the program to the user by express delivery, you can play a proper role. Therefore, even though we may use Java ,. net and so on. We can use dynamic languages such as F # And python, or other tools such as reporting service to achieve higher satisfaction by shortening the waiting time of customers.

Combination to solve the problem

As mentioned above, various languages and tools have their own advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, in some cases, we can combine them to solve problems, in this way, the advantages of various languages and tools will be used to avoid their respective weaknesses.

For example, in a small project, we used a combination of multiple technologies to solve the problem. The goal of the project is to generate some data and transmit it to a website in the form of SFTP. the manufacturers of the website will perform subsequent processing.

Because the data to be generated is actually in the Oracle database, the most suitable language is Oracle's PL/SQL. We have developed this function using the stored procedure to avoid network transmission, in addition, you do not need to use advanced languages to connect to the database to call the database. In addition, related jobs are set in the database to generate corresponding data at a specific time.

Due to security restrictions, the operation in the database ends above. Next we use C # and use the Enterprise Library to generate the corresponding text file.

In the last step, we didn't use the class library in. Net because it is troublesome to support SFTP, So we directly set up a process and call Putty to perform the upload operation. This operation is very simple, that is, the batch processing file (. BAT ).

In this way, we have combined a variety of technologies in the project, so that the development time is greatly shortened and the effect is good. In addition, we can monitor the intermediate products in all aspects.

Conclusion

From the above content, we can see that in many enterprises, the ultimate goal of it is to solve business problems. To better achieve this goal, we must implement both software and hardware, improve your capabilities in all aspects.