Making Things Better Makes Things Worse

This could be a Friday Philosophy but I’ve got a couple of those lined up already. Anyway, I am suffering at work at the moment. I’m encountering a phenomenon that I have talked about with Dennis Adams a couple of times. It probably has a proper term, but basically it is the odd situation that when you make things better, you get more complaints. {Dennis, do you know the proper term?}

{Update. Dennis was good enough to link to this paper he wrote on customer feedback}

Anyway, Let me explain. You have an application sitting on a database. The screens are slow, the reports take an age to come out, your might even have considerable system instability and unplanned outages. The users are not unhappy. They were unhappy last year. Now they are just cynical and they just expect the system to be slow, unresponsive, flaky. So they do not report any problems.

Then things change. The system gets some much-needed care and attention and now the slowest reports get tuned up, the screens come back faster and less spontaneous department-wide coffee breaks are caused by the system crashing. Everything gets better. But not for the help desk, now they start getting calls. “This report is too slow”. “Why can’t I jump straight from the customer screen to the pending orders screen?”. This happens because the users now realise that something can be done. There is a point in complaining as there is a chance their piece of misery could be made better. I certainly went through this many years ago when I inherited a system that crashed every week. No one mentioned it, they just went to tea and complained about it. The first time it crashed after I arrived I could not believe that no one had called before I had realised it had died. Once it had been up solidly for a couple of months, then when it crashed boy did we hear about it!

Also, when you improve a system and things generally get better, occasionally something will improve and then fall back a bit. Hardly anyone says “thanks” for the initial improvement but they will say something if it improves and then drops back.

That is what is happening for my main client at the moment. The system was not that bad, but it needed some help. Why else would I be there? I’ve been beavering away with the rest of the team and we are making things better, so far mostly at an underlying “getting the overall system straight” level. A new chap has joined to help concentrate on performance and he is really making inroads into specific things, individual reports and processes that need a good sorting out.

So now that things are getting better and performance is generally improving, anything that is still slow is being brought up by the development and support teams. Also, we’ve made a few things slower (I’m sorry, it just happens like that) and they certainly get mentioned.

So, I’m busy. And I could get annoyed at people asking why X is slower when Y and Z are faster. But I don’t, because Dennis explained this counter intuitive theory to me.

I know things are getting better as people are annoyed as opposed to apathetic 🙂