Resolution Experience....

What is the definition of quality? 

According to Robert Pirsig, 'Quality is Mental Satisfaction'. Once you get some work done and you are extremely happy with it, then you can say that you received the highest quality. In case you have any 'post purchase dissonance', if you have the nagging doubt at the back of your mind that 'something is not correct', they you have not got quality.

I was thinking of Quality during my recent interaction with Rozana.

In the organization where I work, there is a centralized payable team that handles all the employee expense reports. Once the employee / consultant incur expenses on a company project, they can claim expenses through and Expense Portal. The Expense report that you enter goes for approval and once it is approved it gets paid by the payable team led by Rozana.

We have a severe time limitation. The consultant has to get the expense report paid off in a span of one month from the expense date. Since he incurs expense on a daily basis, the consultant accumulates about 15 - 20 days of expenses into one report and submits the same for approval. This will give him about 10 days of window where he can follow up to ensure that the expenses are paid off to the credit card company.

As you can see the time window is very tight for completing the expense processes.

While entering the last expense report, I encountered problem. The system was not opening to allow me to enter expenses.

I was stuck and was becoming frantic. I raised a service request with the technical team. That Service Request travelled all over the place for about 14 days before reaching Rozana's team. 

One analyst from the team called up. She wanted to see the issue. I demonstrated the same to her. At the end of it all, she seemed confused regarding the cause of the problem. She told me that she will raise another SR and there will be a delay in resolution to this issue.

I flipped out.

"I am going to escalate this issue", I told her.

"Ram, please talk to Rozana before you escalate. She is our team lead", the analyst told me.

Rozana being the team lead, I was hesitant to call her. However, since my escalation is related to Rozana's area, I thought I will inform her before I escalate. It is only fair that she should understand the situation before it gets escalated.

Rozana was brisk as she came over the phone. She asked a few questions like when was the last time I raised an ER? What changed between the time that I raised the last SR and now? 

Other than informing her that nothing has changed in the last 15 days since I entered the first and successful Expense report, I couldn't help her much. .

"See Ram," Rozana spoke patiently, "That you were able to raise an SR about 15 days ago means that there is nothing related to the application. Your problem is related to local machine. If you are using IE, delete the cookies and temp files and try again."

Cookies is a problem normally affecting Internet Explorer. Quickly I tried the Expense Application using Google Chrome. Normally Chrome is not affected by cookies.

And it worked. The problem that was bugging me for the last 14 days, was suddenly resolved. And I was very happy. 

That is quality. Rozana was able to ask a few pertinent questions, identify the correct issue and suggest resolution all in a span of 15 minutes.

"Cost of tightening the nut: One Dollar"

"Cost of identifying which nut to tighten: 99 dollars"

By asking a few pertinent questions, Rozana was quickly able to identify the correct nut to tighten. And that completely resolved the issue. 

That is quality my friends. Identifying the key issue and providing the correct resolution. 

I liked it. 

Rozana, you are great !!!