An Email to my project manager to discuss project.

Why LISA?

   Recently, I always think about why my company will use LISA. Who make the decision that we should use LISA? Because I think we need to make the one who can make the decision feel the advantage of LISA. Then we can get more business and more resources.

Who decide to use LISA?

l  We? I hope so, but of course not. We are developers, we only can wait for requirements and do the implementation.

l  Business support? No, they are support team, they involved into project after we implemented.

l  IT Director? He is the guy to manage all projects, and drive us the right way to go, but only on technique side.

l  Sales? Maybe. Sales can drive customer to use LISA, if they think LISA is a good product or platform.

l  Customer? Definitely that only customer can make final decision.

 

Pros and Cons

What is the pros and cons for Customer/Sales who can make the decision?

 

Roles	Pros	Cons
Customer (Who should mostly focus on the UI and feature, but don’t care about which platform to use, who to develop.)	Low cost	No good user experience No fantastic UI Compared to the web site below: http://www.charliegentle.co.uk/ http://www.slidedeck.com/ http://icondock.com/
Sales	Good example of succeed projects Know all available feature	Limit features Besides pre-defined feature, if customer has more requirements, we need more develop work.

 

What are we doing now?

·         Improvements for Back Office

·         Improvements for Control Panel

What we do is for Business Support, but customer will not know it and see it. If we have built-in UI (web part) with great animation effect, and show it to customer. If we have all features, compared to other systems, of course customer will like our system.

And good thing is that we develop one time (one web part), it can be shared with all programs.

 

 

About Team

Now team members are more focus on its own part, nobody knows the whole system. So we have a lot of duplicate logic, code in different place. It is a big problem when we do the maintains, and want to make feature more generic.

Also, if one developer leaves the team, we will lack of his knowledge and coding. I cannot image if Xu Zhen leaves the team, how can we deal with Dynamic Entity engine?

We need  knowledge share inside team. So that we can know how the feature implement, why we cannot share the same method/feature to other module or sub-system. And we can get more ideas to improve our current system.

And all team members lost power and energy. I felt tired and lost the attitude on LISA. Sometimes, you look at the code two years before, without any comments, it is very depressed for me. I know nobody want to go back to review and refine all the codes, but we have to. This time we managed the new Control Panel. It is a good opportunity to make CP code more clear and easy to read. We create base forms, base user controls and some standard. It’s good, but due to the time line, a lot of old forms and most of business logic is copied from old CP. And not all of team members know how to fully use the base forms and base user controls, because we don’t have knowledge share.

 

I really like LISA project and want it become more successful. I hope more and more projects will come and start to use LISA.

 

About myself

       It is half year passed from 2010. I don’t think I provide more things to LISA, to business support. I haven’t improved myself or give LISA more value. I was a bit disappointed. I don’t want to find that nothing changed by the end of this year. I am looking forward to a conversion with you.

 

 

Comments:

LISA : A CRM system which can generate different UI to end-user, and with built-in features like member, transaction, point, redemption, report and so on.