Eating my own dog food...

I’ve been heavily involved in taking a number of systems live over the last few months – hence the paucity of blog posts. One key thing I did learn was the importance of eating your own dog-food. Short of resource with the live date looming we ended up in all hands to the pump mode keying a pile of information into the system to ensure that the users had all their data to hand in the new system. If you spend long enough performing heavy data entry duties you quickly identify those irritating areas that are unnecessarily mouse click or key board intensive. While we take a lot of trouble to work with vendors to design a system that’s as ergonomic as possible, sometimes the drawing board doesn’t quite translate to real life. User acceptance testing will pick up many of these problems, but if you really want to check you’ve done a good job there’s nothing to beat living the life of the user for a while.