One area many of us tend to gloss over is that of ongoing support. Often, those of us who do strategic planning, gather requirements, or implement software are not the same people who provide ongoing support. The skills most needed for support activities aren’t necessarily skills that we use in the earlier activities. When we wind up involved in support activities, here are three things we to remember:

1. Be Patient
Not only is this most important skill needed in this circumstance, but also the hardest one for many of us to acquire. People good at programming the system can be notorious for their lack of patience and lack of people-skills. With that said, we must be patient in order to really understand the unique problem that each user brings to the table.

That patience must spill over into our explanations to users once the problem is resolved, as well. Users sometimes view issues differently from the person resolving them.

2. Be Creative
For those of you who haven’t realized it yet, everyone does not understand issues in exactly the same way. When we explain how we’re going to resolve a problem or what a user should do differently, the key is to find unique ways to describe it. If one explanation doesn’t suffice, find another.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in being technically correct that we can’t get our point across to the end-user. Although I agree that it’s important for end-users to learn at least a small amount of the terminology related to a particular system, as it will help them explain problems more easily in the future, I need to point out that our main focus NOW must be to solve the problem.

3. Know Some History
End-users who were part of the implementation likely have a different view and a higher level of understanding of the system than those who weren’t involved until they began to use the system in their daily work. If you know which users were involved in the implementation, it might help you understand why certain users are asking different questions from others, or why certain users are having different problems.