At 7:31 PM -0800 12/2/97, Vince Sabio wrote:
> Pretty general. People don't pay attention. Don't worry about it,
> though
Don't worry about it *until* you know whether or not its your problem.
Do you know what your error rate is? If you have 200 admin operations a
day and 5 of them are bad, it ain't your fault. It's pilot error. If
you have 50 admin operations a day and 5 of them are bad, then you
better go find out why and fix the problem.
Don't just assume it's stupid users. Maybe it's stupid or unclear
documentation. I just rewrote a bunch of mine (actually, I'm about 1/4
done, but the first key piece is in) because I went and logged both
errors and user reports, and found a huge percentage of errors were
because the documentation confused people.
How many list admins know what their error rates are? How many know
they HAD one?
Generally, mine is between 1-2% a day. one or two botches out of 100.
Not bad, IMHO, but higher than it should be.
If users are having problems, ask them why. analyze the errors and see
if there are themes, or ways to help those willing to be helped.
You'll never help the truly clueless, but until you study what's going
on, how do you know they are truly clueless? If you've got an error
rate of 10% (and I've seen lists that high), it ain't the users... but
you don't know until you check...
I've pretty literally spent the last year looking for and studying list
issues like this, and you'd be amazed at what a few well-placed
signposts can do. But you can't put down signposts at random, you have
to know where people are getting lost.
(and yes, one of my upcoming projects is to write up as much of this as
I can, but it's a secondary project to actually implementing the rest
of the beast. And one key future is figuring out how to build reports
and formal metrics that can be argued over, refined and adopted, so
that they're useful to people other than me -- because I know my sites
well enough know to intuitively know when something's skew, but that
doesn't help make things something someone else can administer
easily....).
--
Chuq Von Rospach (chuq@apple.com) Apple IS&T Mail List Gnome
<http://www.solutions.apple.com/ListAdmin/>
Plaidworks Consulting (chuqui@plaidworks.com) <http://www.plaidworks.com/>
(<http://www.plaidworks.com/hockey/> +-+ The home for Hockey on the net)
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