Listening to the User

It’s an age-old business maxim: Make the customer happy and you’ll be happy. The nice part about applying it here is that most customers encountered by IT people are pretty reasonable folks. They know that systems may have bugs, or may need to be tweaked, or may need some additional fine tuning. So they don’t necessarily mind when such things crop up. But what they do mind are surprises. It’s the unexpected that throws them (just like everybody else). And the unexpected is almost always the result of failure of one party to listen to the other. User acceptance testing is a key point in any project’s evolutionary progress. My own professional experience bears this out. In mature shops, in which project teams and sponsors are ...

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