Aniruddha Raste's blogs

In a life of a project, apart from usual aspects viz. cost, time, quality etc etc. customer relationship aspects play important role. Let us look at this aspect slightly differently. Consider following three ' personalities '. Customer comes with a characteristics of his own. These consist of various aspects like current business, organizational competencies, other problems being faced and personalities of the stake holders themselves. The Problem to be solved has its own characteristics. They consist of the nature of problem, commercial, functional, technical aspects, level of complexity, R&D content, how long customer is suffering from it, is it futuristic etc. You, the developer have characteristics of your own. They also consist of your organization, competencies, resources such as time, money, people etc. Various interactions among these three ' personalities ' give rise to multiple situations in a life of a project. It may always seem that there

In last post Customer is the king... and more! , I wrote about inevitable customer dependency and how sellers may take advantage of it. Dependency should not create a sense of 'being locked' with the product or service. Some ways by which customer gets 'locked' are: Proprietary data format and ways to read / write it Custom components to do trivial jobs User accounts, loyalty programs Restrictive licensing Artificial compatibility between hardware and software components of same seller What are the ways to reduce - if cannot entirely remove - customer's dependencies on sellers and their products? Some ways are: Increase standardization, use minimal standards Increase generalization, reduce specialization Make product flawless Make product stateless Educate customer to help himself Make system customizable / soft coded Provide compatible components and let customer assemble it to suit his purpose Make interaction transactional Some of th

My experiences on being a seller as well as customer. I have been both the provider of service and a customer - not necessarily in software business. In any business, customer and seller relationships exist. Customer is the King True that! Because he is paying money to get his work done, and money is what you want to make! So in order to make more money we make customer the king of business. He gets requirements stated or changed, he defines quality and finally signs off the deliverable which opens the money gate. He is definitely in a commanding position when the product is being built. Customer is an Emperor ... when customer is in Japan! Japanese people take every thing to a different level. They treat customer not only like king, but like an emperor!. Customer's words are treated as imperial orders, obeyed precisely and deliveries made. Deliveries are not just deliveries they are submissions of duties in honor of the emperor. This is definitely worth taking an experienc

A warm welcome and hot coffee.!... no no no. that is not enough. You get to see a whole lot of different world. You get to see how your customer looks Do you have some idea about your customer? Do you think he is great, rich, technically enabled? He knows everything and anything? no. Customer is just like us. he also has limited resources, cost implications and techincal problems. If you can understand this, it will reflect in the solution you provide. You will consider his problems, and use your skills most effectively to benefit the customer. You get to see how your customer works Customer has his own problems to solve. He has different soup in his plate. He is trying to reduce his problems by seeking solution from us. If we create more problems by our solution, it adds to his problems. You also get to see what ideas he implements to solve his problems. you can pick some idea in your solution. That will enable the customer to solve his problem in better manner. You also get