If you are not sure, pick up the phone!

Here we are 3 days before the start of go live activities and once again a seemingly straight forward task has caused issues. We are upgrading the claims system to support another line of business. This line uses different checks than the workers comp product already on the claim system. Because of this and other requirements the vendor was creating a new check print function that will support multi drawer printing. A couple of weeks ago there was some concern that the vendor was not understanding the check layout so I sent a sample from the existing system. The sample had a top part and a bottom part. I was concerned with the top part which is the actual check. However when the vendor got the sample they took the whole thing as the requirement even though in the past our user said that the bottom items were not needed. This of course caused confusion and apparently extra work from the vendor. Now I will take responsibility for part of the confusion and have already told the vendor this. However, when the vendor originally got the sample and saw the extra items on the bottom, why did they not just call and get clarification.

This is the lesson from today. Yes we need to be clear when we send requirements to  the developer but if the item sent is different than what was discussed, they should call first and get clarification. This should be true throughout any project. If something changes that you are not sure of, pick up the phone and ask.Fortunately this incident should not cause us to miss the go live but it was a distraction that we did not need.