neorants

Wow… All that hard work has finally resulted in an application that is full-featured enough to use on a daily basis. I finally got the go-ahead to roll out PALADIN overnight last night, and overall I’d say the rollout went relatively smoothly.

Sure, there are those people who seem to think it’s just more of the same, or even have the balls to downright bash it, but most people seem to be pretty happy with it thus far — at least those people who are ever happy.

I think the biggest thing that people have against it is that it has pretty stringent data validation, which makes our initial job in getting information into the database a bit harder. But knowing that you have good, solid information available is worth it in the long run. In the past few weeks I spent some time working up a few subroutines to do reporting. I found out about this great 1980’s-era spreadsheet format called SYLK. It’s plain text, but still allows for the inclusion of fonts, formatting, and formulas and is readable by MS Excel. So now, administrative types can generate reports that tell them exactly how active each PALADIN user is, how long it takes trouble tickets to get resolved, who the problem customers are (defined as the people who demand the most hands-on attention), all filtered by company region, user, or date range. It seems to be a hit, and I have to admit I’m finding the statistics we can generate very interesting myself.

In short, PALADIN is all about holding people accountable for taking care of customers and making sure nobody slips through the cracks and, ironically, I think that’s what is so disenchanting about it to some people.