In 2012 InfoEd Global set out to make a number of important changes in the way we support and release our software. We had three overarching goals:
- improve the client care experience
- improve the quality of our support deliverables
- establish a consistent and predicable release cycle
In pursuit of our first goal, we combined several company functions (Professional Services, Support, Development and Quality Assurance) under one leadership umbrella. This allowed us greater continuity of client care and more effective prioritization and assignment of resources. We then refined our support focus; valuing agility, coordination, sustainability and transparent communication with our customers and promoting increased, effective internal collaboration.
This increase in collaboration gave us the platform to work on our second goal, improving the quality of our support deliverables. We made sure all completed development tasks were immediately assigned a release, added to the QA testing cycles and incorporated into baseline code as quickly as possible. This reduced the need to spend a development resource’s time fixing and patching an issue for multiple clients or contending with residual issues.
This coordination of bug fixes and release management then allowed us to meet our third goal, putting in place a predictable schedule of six week maintenance releases. This cycle has proven successful in establishing more stable code, fewer hand patches and therefore greater overall stability. While we have had made strides towards meeting all three of our goal, we appreciate we have much further to go.
A few data points from 2012:
- 26% reduction in issues opened on a daily basis
- 15% reduction in total number of issues in the ITEMS system
- 27% increase in number of issues resolved daily
- 44% decrease in number of resolved issues that return to InfoEd.
- 33% reduction in hand patching
All percentages based on a daily average comparison from 2011 to 2012
In 2013 we are looking to continue our focus on the first two goals of last year. This has led us to making some changes in ITEMS that you will see in the first quarter of 2013. Our intention behind these changes is to create a better collaboration between our support team and our customers. We will be introducing a standardized criteria for all customers to establish priority of their reported problems. We are working to create these criteria by collaborating with some of you as well as speaking with other software companies and reviewing their effective practices. In making these changes we are striving for better response time and more effective resource utilization. This will ensure all of our customers are getting access to the available support resources.
We have made real progress this year and I am excited about all the remains in front of us. And I haven’t even gotten into ENABLE and those changes, but that will be best for next InfoEdge. Stay tuned!
