The Rise of the Coordinators

If you are part of the solution delivery industry then it should not come as a surprise that besides being highly technical in practices and terminologies, the end user of this industry falls beneath the average IQ line.

Since the creation of the first line of code to the first ever smiley pasted in a chat room, this fact was kept well hidden, but it has befall inevitable and now, we have to cope up.

Contextual side of the client complaints:

In this industry, the client’s resentments are contextual. The nature of client grievances shall depict different meanings to different stakeholders in diverse situations. But the real question that hangs like a sword on a solution provider heads is; what makes a client angry and how can we manage that complaint?

Under the general world context, it can be anything from a fire on a factory floor, someone in need of a first aid, or a tweaking tire in a car; all these situations throw the general best practices out of the window and require immediate skilled solutions.

Similarly, in the business of software development, it could be anything from an unfulfilled marketing claim, a glitch in the requirement understanding, a business rule being coded wrongly, a module crashing with a single click, an unanswered support call or, over-billing for chargeable activities.

Each context carries its own weight-age and requires surgical precision to handle it accordingly. Question is how to make that guy on the other end of the line satisfied?

The human management:

I don’t know if most of us have noticed, but within the revolutions of the software industry, in regards to technologies and life cycles, the human side has furthermore evolved. We have to admit the un denying fact, that software applications are not something highly technical anymore, in fact, have become delicate mix of codes, screens, dialogue boxes, touches, clicks, swaps and user experience.

With Cloud serving as the ultimate library of resources, the barriers in user’s choice has diminished. Considering the numbers, there are currently 1.5 million apps available on both Apple and Google Play stores. Consequently, keeping a customer loyal has become the prime challenge for the software development industry.

In order to keep a client coming back for more and stay loyal to your products requires simpler and understandable human thinking. If you set out to this being excessively technical or by being obvious, then smart user on the other end are going to roll their eyes somewhere else, and in a matter of click, you will be searching for another sellable idea, or eventually going back to the design board.

The right resources:

The domains of marketing, development, business analysis, testing, quality assurance, customer support and implementation have their own specialized roles. Altogether, these diverse functions are serving one entity, the customer. For the large software houses, these domains become independent organizational structures and usually share large pool of resources as per their technical and non-technical needs.

To organize further, the functional areas share a common platform to manage and share resources. For an outsider, it seems like a very simple activity comprising of developers and computer screens, but the perspective of solution delivery is way more complicated than anticipated by the eyes of an end user.

There is now an imminent requirement for specialized coordinator role to work within these complex software delivery structures. Usually, this role serves well within the domain of business analysts and customer support people, but since the evolution of the latter into more technical aspects, the gap re-emerged for more human oriented actors.

The communication and coordination areas work on either side of the picture, whether it is a solution delivery company, or a client in search of a solution. Both require people with extensive capabilities in communication, human psychology, change management and project coordination.

Internationally speaking, already the business sector has started to acquire similar resources encompassing the same skill set. These setups are either in process of getting a customized solution or a large enterprise resource solution with regards to integrating their practices. In order to achieve this, these large setups require special resources to manage change, maintain accessible communication lines among functional areas, management and human resources.

The resources they seek out are not overly technical, nor are they specially trained computer professionals.

Who can fit in?

These resources are mere management techies with a tinge of human understanding in their line of career. They do have extensive experience supporting their skills, but usually that parachute carries too many colors.

The best suited people for this kind of role are software testers and business analysts. The reason being is that they work at the both ends of the bridge between the developers and the clients. Their comfort zone lies within this boundary. Both these titles have no constraints of either being getting technical with the developers to clarify business process issues, or, by getting psychologically effective with the clients and their complaints, and eventually bringing both sides on a comfortable common ground.

In my opinion, these people are firefighters, the last line of defense, and the unnamed rescuers. You send them where the things are not in your control anymore, and they can resolve these anomalies for you.

The direction in which the computer industry is headed, the need to hire for coordination professionals shall rise with good factors. As the word “user experience journeys” is creating more ripples among the minds of the techies, the pressure however cannot be exerted on the technical teams, as they will break apart.

To get things driven in accordance with the set goals, we will sooner or later call for Firefighters. It is only a matter of time.