Seek first to Understand

I think it's the third of fourth habit in Steve Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" right?

Another lesson in this today.

We've had an interesting support issue over the past couple of days regarding our payroll system, and Time in Lieu. This is where an employee works a 40 hour week, is paid for a 38 hours week but accrues 2 hours each week, towards an RDO. The catch is, all 40 hours have to be costed to jobs, even though they are only paid for 38 hours.

I documented a way to achieve this, by setting a cost allocation rate, entering 38 hours, then 2 hours time in lieu. All 40 hours get allocated. All 40 hours accrue entitlements. Only 38 of the hours have a pay rate - two do not. I went to great lengths to document this and for the first few sites it worked well.

Then a thorn in my side - one particular customer, no matter how many ways we explained it, could get their head around it. We explained it forwards backward, sideway, inside out...they just couldn't get passed the fact that they weren't entering payment lines for all 40 hours.

Now to cut a very long story short, it wasn't until we asked them to send copies of three week's time sheets, and a payslip that the penny dropped for me.

Their payslip showed all 40 hours worth of payments then a deduction for the 2 hours.  When you put it this way, it is so bloody obvious it's not funny. They show their employee all the payments they are eligible for, then they show the employee the money coming back out again.

Because we were focussing purely on a job costing (allocate costs to jobs) then topping up the accrual of entitlements later, we completely focussed on getting the hours in there without looking at it from the employee and his/her payslip side of things. Our clients solution still achieves all the same things but produces a better (more correct I think) payslip.

The nitty-gritty of this example doesn't matter that much.  The point remains the same - being so focussed on our solution, particularly since it had already worked for three other clients we just headed straight down the same path without trying to understand or really, really listen to what the client's concerns were.

It turns out, our system is flexible and well designed and can easily handle either scenario - if we'd just listened to what they were really asking, straight away, we would have heard, I want (or we need) the time in lieu to show as a deduction.

Now it does - now everyone is happy. (Just want to remember this...)