Custom Reports

[Mike or Penny Novack]

>
>Please don't patronise your readership by assuming you know their usage
>and requirements better than they do.  
>
>Colin
>  
>
I'm trying not to do that, Colin. And I really am an experienced analyst.

The "client" knows his or her business needs (and I don't). But perhaps 
not as good a judge of what "usage of the tools" will fulfill those 
needs. Quite often the "client" has jumped ahead from the original 
business needs to a particular solution of those needs (a particular way 
to use the tool) and sees as a problem that the tool can't be easily 
used THAT way. The job of an analyst is to find out the client's 
business needs and then point out all the different ways the tool might 
be used to achieve those.

Here you have the complaint that you end up with a long chain of saved 
reports. Perhaps if you went back to the beginning with me and started 
with your business requirements we'd find that a different process of 
creating and saving reports would lead to a different (less long chain) 
structure of saved reports.

That's where it starts, asking questions (to determine those needs). And 
no, don't know your usage, but how you already the tool isn't the point 
because POSSIBLY that is the problem (the business need might better be 
satisfied by using the tool in an entirely different way).

Michael

PS -- some of this is at the heart of the differences between a "manual" 
and a "user guide". The former shows you how to manage different parts 
of the tool but the latter might tell you what part of the tool used in 
what way might do thus and so. When all you have is a "manual" there is 
a very great risk that the wrong part of the tool or a part used wrongly 
leads to a solution that is overly clumsy and that can appear as a 
deficiency of the product. There is a big difference between "the 
product doesn't let me do thus and so THAT way" and "the product doesn't 
have a way to do thus and so".

-- 
There is no possibility of social justice on a dead planet except the equality of the grave.