Many in the IT field love to be called professionals. They take pride in the fact that being called a professional puts them “above the rest”. But really – can you claim to be a professional just because of some badge or achievement or exam you’ve passed?
I talk to many professionals in the SMB space, and one of the things I constantly hear is that they never have time to test out software before deploying it to a clients site. When they have problems, they then blame the software vendor for the issue and not accept the fact that they might have eliminated many of the issues had they taken the time to do some testing first. I don’t for a minute think that doing testing in your own environment will eliminate ALL the things you are likely to see onsite, because things are often different, but taking the time to play with things first means you can more easily become a real professional.
I also hear that people don’t have time to do this because they need to be earning money. Isn’t this part of the rate you charge the customer? Isn’t this part of being a professional that the customer expects that you do know what you are doing?
I also know that you can’t possibly test out every piece of software before you deploy it to the clients – in that circumstance, I advocate being upfront with the client and let them know that you can’t test this before deployment and I’d expect some consideration given in terms of billing for the client whilst you learn on the fly. It seems only right doesn’t it?
Doctors never perform an operation on a live patient – therefore why should we “professionals” go out and do things to our customers network environment if we’ve not even tried it out on our own environment first?
Are you a professional… really?
I deal with managing a lot of so called “professionals” who do sub par work and are improperly trained but to be fair there is also not a lot of margin in much of the IT market and your comparison to other respected professions is just silly. Doctors earn between 4-10 times what an IT professional earns and much of their testing is done by researchers and drug companies who back them up – the same sort of support should be there for IT professionals instead of software companies released poorly tested software and patches. Finally, doctors do test on real patients with full disclosure that they are testing.
Customers, particularly small businesses, are also simply not willing to foot the bill for the sort of quality they expect from their health provider. I continually see clients who will take the business risk of losing a limb in systems terms for a small saving – yet comparing to medicine none would consider anything less than the best their money can buy for saving a real limb. Even when faced with all the best figures and probabilities we see them opting to save money because IT doesn’t feel like a worthwhile investment. This is particularly true of customers who would be considering SBS as a solution platform.
The only way to get the same level of professionalism in IT is regulate the industry by making qualification and registration mandatory. You can’t call yourself a doctor unless you are properly trained and you will be deregistered if you below par. This will drive up prices for customers but it will also drive up quality and reduce rework and downtime.
Finally software companies need to be more accountable. Too much unfinished poorly tested junk finds it way to market and Microsoft is as guilty of this as any other vendor. Hopefully some lessons have been learned by Microsoft through it’s fiasco with Vista but too often SBS is full of traps and tricks ie bugs that some unsuspecting IT professional following best practice stumbles into.
Wayne if “Doctors never perform an operation on a live patient ” what is the point, they are not going ot bring back the dead :>)
Seriously I do agree with your post however I don’t see the regulation that Simon suggests as being a cureall for our industry. I think it will cost us a lot of small quality professionals who do a great job for their clients, but do not fit into the little cubbie holes some self important oversight group chose to publish.
hehe – trust you Andy to spot that 🙂 it means you are reading it though which is great – thanks!
I agree with you – regulation is not going to fix it, but I’d love to help drive up the professionalism of the people delivering the service.
As Simon said too, the software/hardware vendors have a duty of care that means they should be held to higher expecations as well.
I’d love to see them take more responsibility for their faults and failings. And I say that with full recognition of the role I hold at StorageCraft – although I will admit the testing we do @ StorageCraft “tends” to weed out the big issues before we release – it’s still not perfect.
Some software vendors GIVE the so called Professionals too much ammunition by NOT allowing people to beta test their software to a major extent. They NEED to offer longer beta tests in REAL WORLD environmnets and need to be prepared to SUPPORT BETA environments if they want to succeed.
Thanks to both of you so far for your comments!
Wayne,
While I partly agree with you, the today software, especially from Microsoft, is so complex and badly tested by the software companies, that it contains an infinite amount of possibilities for the things go wrong, especially a half cooked bundle like SBS. I had quite a few issues when I started playing with it in the ‘sterile’ environment of my testing lab; and every time it is being installed on site there is something new pops up simply because the QA at Microsoft doesn’t do its job and because the updates often break the spaggetti. Fortunately, the problems experienced by the clients are of nuisance rather than substance; nevertheless it is not possible to test everything.
What I agree with is that –
1. Consideration for billing/hours should be given to the clients
2. Honest disclaimer and warning.