“I am waiting for the business unit’s feedback”, “The feedback got so far hasn’t been promising”, “There is a clear lack of feedback”, “After the launch, we received exceptionally positive feedback”; workplaces are abuzz with these comments. If you never heard any of these statements at work, there is something abnormal with your workplace.

With all this feedback coming in, we must be getting better and making sound decisions at work. That doesn’t seem to be the case; we often find ourselves trying to solve the same problem over and over again that recorded serious feedback the first time the problem surfaced itself. Where does all this feedback go anyway? One could be quick to say “As long as I can restore that email from the archive, I can share it”. But most of the time it gets lost in people’s short term memory limitations and selective memory protocols, becomes subjective in nature, or gets distorted as time passes by.

Leaders in every department of the business including Information Technology prescribe and teach the value of feedback in their processes, and operations; but do very little about recording, preserving the feedback, and really “feeding that back” into the process. Organizations typically view feedback as a process of sharing observations, concerns, and better ways of achieving a task with the intent of better performance. Feedback is a process where some portion of the output of a system is passed (fed back) into the system. The idea behind the true implementation of feedback is creating a culture of “always learning”, refining systems/processes and getting better at operations with experiences, let it be software development or running a company.

Feedback during Software Development
Agile development methodologies prescribe constant end-user collaboration and interaction in an effort to include the feedback loop as part of the process. But, agile methodologies don’t really offer feedback instruments that are practical. It’s left to the practitioners of the software development methodologies to come up with indigenous models to record, analyze and act on feedback from the customers. Yet another argument for software development is more of an art than science (that’s another discussion)! But, the lack of standardization is an opportunity for creative minds. Imagine recording, sharing and creating an audit trail of the feedback with the revisions of the software solution in an agile model… that would make your customers happy noting that their feedback is valued and acted upon. If you are not willing to invest in the Software Lifecycle management solutions to relate customer feedback to product road maps, there are alternatives. Wikis… there are several Open Source Wiki implementations that do the job. They usually don’t offer a category of feedback for you to signify the concept; but it could be a good thing as it could eliminate the intimidation factor for the feedback provider. Wiki by its nature works as a collaborative tool where people contribute collectively, and the whole process is transparent.
Wikis can be used as a platform to compile all the project documents, design/architecture artifacts, user feedback, mapping of feedback items to task lists that make up the upcoming revisions of the product, and best of all this is so informal, you would be amazed of the user participation in this feedback process. Several successful IT organizations made serious inroads using Wikis to bring the business and IT communities together in a nimble, agile and transparent fashion in delivering successful software products.

Feedback in Enterprise Systems
Implementing a feedback loop during software development with collaborative tools such as Wikis gives you a head start in developing a software product that satisfies your project stakeholders and sponsors. That’s only the job half done. The other half of the job is the tough one that comprises of more than 95% of your user base that will end up using the enterprise software solution that you just delivered. The stakeholders typically are hand-picked by the sponsors and usually are leaders or front-runners of the business user community. For the enterprise solution to be widely successful you need the acceptance of each and every employee belonging to every echelon of the user group.
Your selected stakeholders already know how to provide feedback for you, but how would the majority of the user base (that do not take part in the initial discussions) take part in the feedback mechanism? The usual answer is they don’t. If the use cases that they go through on a daily basis are not met by the software product they don’t buy into the solution, and don’t try to explore the merits of the product; what’s worse, they often let their frustrations about the system in the presence of the end customer. (Do you remember the time you called the credit card company or any company, and the customer service rep complained about how the system was slow and didn’t do what you wanted him/her to do!)
Surprisingly, including the user base as part of the feedback loop is not a difficult task. Imagine a neat little widget that appears on every screen of the application that takes the user feedback; concerns, suggestions, ramblings, whatever. The user feels empowered, the business unit and IT get their feedback (provided they look at it in the backend), and reinforce the users belief in the system by acting on it in the next iterations of the system. This really is fundamental, but its heart wrenching to see all the cool effects on the UIs and very few enterprise applications that actually provide opportunities for capturing user feedback as inherent to the software solution! I say like Search or Help in every user interface, you need to have Feedback option.

Feedback at Enterprise Level
Organizations spend a fortune investing in software solutions that provide analytics on customers (that they rarely directly speak to). Yet, they ignore the feedback that exists in the natural surroundings of the business. Management often complains that it’s hard to figure out what the customer wants, what the customer feels about our products or services, and that the bigger we get the harder it is to implement the feedback loop. Also in this Internet age, businesses big or small find themselves caught in the negative publicity fueled by the free comparison and review web sites. Chances are you will find the real deal about your local cable company on these sites from the customer perspective than on their corporate website.
I have a radical idea if there are any takers… every business should have their own feedback center (read totally open and transparent) on their corporate website. That way, the disgruntled customer has every incentive to report the frustration on the company’s website first before going to a third party. And from the company’s perspective, you can’t really stop the negative perception of the customer, it’s going to happen on some other website anyway, why not convert that into feedback, openly display the issue to public in your feedback center, take the chance to act on it, do something about it, resolve it, make the customer happy, show your other customers and potential customers that you care about their business.

Feedback for the sake of it remains just that; and feedback loop is complete only when gathering feedback, and acting on it are parts of the process itself.