Sun employee & fanatical motorcyclist Mike Belch's Weblog Biker Mike's Weblog

For the past four years I have been part of a team that has been developing and rolling out an improvement programme to Sun's field engineering community. The programme which consists of methodology components, tools and document templates - all underpinned by a wealth of standards, best practice and experience - is called AIM. The name is derived from three stages that form part of any customer engagement lifecycle: Architect, Implement and Manage.

So why am I blogging about AIM? Why should anyone in the blogosphere care about an internal change programme within Sun? Simple. AIM makes a huge difference to our customers. More on this later.

AIM allows Sun's customer facing engineers and partners to architect, deliver and support quality solutions to customer business issues. Detailed attention to understanding and documenting customer requirements followed by methodical implementation, test and deployment of a solution architected to meet those requirements, means that we are more likely to meet the customer's needs and to deliver on scope, on time, on budget and with a carefully manged risk exposure.

The result of using AIM is a tangibile increase in customer satisfaction. After every significant engagement Sun asks the customer to complete a satisfaction survey. Think of this as the "How was it for you darling?" question. The survey asks the customer to rate a number of aspects of the engagement including: satisfaction with Sun and its engineers, professionalism of Sun's engineers, technical competency, communications with the Sun team, ease of doing business with the Sun team, project management effectiveness, effectiveness of the overall project and (most importantly) whether the customer will re-engage the team and do business again with Sun. For every single question asked, Sun is rated higher by our customers when AIM is used.

Customers are satisfied because the Sun solution delivered using AIM does exactly what the customer needs. This helps the customer's business run more smoothly and obviously brings benefits to the customer. But it also brings benefits to Sun. A happy customer is more likely to do business with us again, and a happy customer is more likely to recommend us to other companies.

So let me throw down the following challenges:

• If you are a Sun employee involved in customer engagements please make sure you use AIM for every customer engagement.

• If you are a Sun partner then please come and talk to us about AIM. Share our best practice and share in our success.

• If you are a Sun customer then ask your account team whether they are using AIM to deliver your solution. In fact, go one stage further and insist that they use AIM. If they don't then come and talk to me!