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