Wednesday January 12, 2005

iWork Trouble Reports

As you know iWork is what Sun calls its work from anywhere program. I was talking to my boss today about the perception within Sun that iWork technology is difficult. This is especially the perception among non technical people like Human Resources. A few years ago iWork technology was difficult. Today we have a good technology solution with very few holes. There are still a few things being worked out like how non technical people can get set up running Linux JDS on their lap tops but we are almost there.

What we need now is a system to capture iWork trouble reports. So if someone finds something like what Rich found about token card renewals they could just file an iWork trouble report. We might not be able to fix every process problem right away but it would point us in the right direction. I'd want to somehow differentiate between issues that the normal process should fix and bugs in the process. For example users would go to our resolution center for technical support but if the technical support process didn't work correctly they would file an iWork trouble report. We could then work to address process problems both real and perceived. We would consider each report a defect and work to reduce the number of defects. It would also allow us to show that we are improving our processes. We are getting better and we would have data to prove it. I'm not quite sure how we will do this but I think it is something we need to make happen.