Say You Are Sorry

It happens so often that we screw something up. Deadlines are met, but with software far from completeness. Support issue is left forgotten deep in abyss of support mail folders. Double-checked bug-fix, the developer was swearing it’d work, appears to shut the whole system down. Subcontractor sends a piece of crap they call a “new feature”, but should rather call “a bunch of new bugs”. Nothing extraordinary here.

We aren’t surprised when sometimes our customer after yet another great achievement of above kind goes mad or just tired (if we’re lucky). Pressure’s going up. Customer satisfaction’s going down. There’re some alarming e-mails in the inbox and a couple unpleasant phone calls to answer. We pull ourselves to resolve the problem. Our management pulls us to resolve the problem even faster. And at the end of the day resolution is found – we can congratulate ourselves extinguishing another fire. Can we?

There’s one more thing, which should be done. Tell the customer you’re sorry after all. No dissertation, but short e-mail or quick call saying that it was screwed up remarkably and we should be ashamed about that. That’s all.

I told you once to thank for feedback, but apologizing is even more important. No to leave the whole thing groundless – I had this kind of situation lately. My team has been working on fixing a simple bug for more than a month. There were a lot of fixes, upgrades, downgrades, new bugs were invited and the old one was still there. The best candidate for “the worst issue resolution of the year” prize. After we finally managed to fix the issue I send the “sorry” message to customer’s maintenance team – they were sick with our performance then.

Half an hour later I received a short e-mail:

“Pawel, I’m really content now. So are guys from marketing. Thanks for commitment.”

Nothing more to add.