This article by Kathleen Goolsby, Senior Writer in the Outsourcing Journal points out the benefits of Outsourced Product Development but it also touches on the challenges with offshore outsourcing - communications. While this is a success story, many have failed.
For these reasons, it seems nearshore outsourcing makes more sense. Perhaps someday more media will catch on to the trends.
This case study (for the healthcare industry and SaaS) and press release share examples of how nearshore is working.
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Friday, August 28, 2009
SaaS as quality incentive
In a world where the economy is not in a good shape and 52% of the IT projects cost as much as twice the original estimate and behind schedule, it would seems to be a bad idea to invest in software development. However, there is an approach which minimizes those risks and provides a high degree of quality, leveraging an improvement of the whole software development cycle and final product, and it is called Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
SaaS solutions avoid the problems or errors generated by customer’s configurations, data or usage patterns, exhaustive version updates that can take days or weeks. SaaS uses a single point of service and configuration making sure that all customers get the same experience no matter what type of computer being used. SaaS also reduces the version update time when a fix or enhancement is needed. However, this advantage generates a threat on your service availability, not only for a couple of users but for everyone who is using or is trying to login to the application.
Imagine that your main feature of your service is down or not working the way it was designed; all of your customers will be affected. Sounds too risky? Only in appearance, but definitively it is not; SaaS developers are very conscious about this situation and that is why they make tremendous efforts on preventing any critical error from the conception of the software idea to the delivery of the service. This is where Software Quality Assurance comes into play.
A Quality Assurance team, in a regular software development approach, works on finding defects and reporting them to developers, but you are not paying them for fixing something that they built with errors. In SaaS, a preemptive quality assurance must be followed; the whole team has a quality culture, requirements are gathered very carefully and then are deep analyzed to find early design problems, technical complexities, assumptions and conceptual misunderstandings. Before everything is ready to start coding it is necessary to define how each feature will be accepted as complete (what it should do, how it should work, and what should not do), this is also something that the SaaS customer verifies and approves. Developers and testers then will work on creating the application according to the common agreement, which means it would be delivered exactly as requested. Thus when testing time comes, it will be only to verify that everything is working properly and that time will not be used for finding defects. Good quality in the process will reflect good quality in your SaaS product and no wasted effort or money.
At this point you are probably thinking that not all SaaS vendors have a quality assurance culture, engaged from the early phases of software design, and you are probably right. This type of quality assurance is not being followed by all SaaS providers. There is one issue that you need to consider to identify a company that works this way, that is whether they use Agile Development. Agile Development ensures a constant customer relationship and closer and more interactive work with the development team, allowing the ideal conditions for engaging quality assurance in each phase of the life cycle. In other words, you will get what you asked for with a lower risk of unanticipated defects or faulty features, which as we discussed above, could negatively impact your end users and your business.
Going alone with a SaaS may not guarantee by default a good quality in your application service, but provides a great encouragement to follow a preemptive quality assurance strategy, which can be accomplished if your SaaS vendor is working with Agile Development approach. A good or poor quality of your software service will impact directly to your customers experience and the perception of your company, remember that a good quality gets built from a preemptive vision.
SaaS solutions avoid the problems or errors generated by customer’s configurations, data or usage patterns, exhaustive version updates that can take days or weeks. SaaS uses a single point of service and configuration making sure that all customers get the same experience no matter what type of computer being used. SaaS also reduces the version update time when a fix or enhancement is needed. However, this advantage generates a threat on your service availability, not only for a couple of users but for everyone who is using or is trying to login to the application.
Imagine that your main feature of your service is down or not working the way it was designed; all of your customers will be affected. Sounds too risky? Only in appearance, but definitively it is not; SaaS developers are very conscious about this situation and that is why they make tremendous efforts on preventing any critical error from the conception of the software idea to the delivery of the service. This is where Software Quality Assurance comes into play.
A Quality Assurance team, in a regular software development approach, works on finding defects and reporting them to developers, but you are not paying them for fixing something that they built with errors. In SaaS, a preemptive quality assurance must be followed; the whole team has a quality culture, requirements are gathered very carefully and then are deep analyzed to find early design problems, technical complexities, assumptions and conceptual misunderstandings. Before everything is ready to start coding it is necessary to define how each feature will be accepted as complete (what it should do, how it should work, and what should not do), this is also something that the SaaS customer verifies and approves. Developers and testers then will work on creating the application according to the common agreement, which means it would be delivered exactly as requested. Thus when testing time comes, it will be only to verify that everything is working properly and that time will not be used for finding defects. Good quality in the process will reflect good quality in your SaaS product and no wasted effort or money.
At this point you are probably thinking that not all SaaS vendors have a quality assurance culture, engaged from the early phases of software design, and you are probably right. This type of quality assurance is not being followed by all SaaS providers. There is one issue that you need to consider to identify a company that works this way, that is whether they use Agile Development. Agile Development ensures a constant customer relationship and closer and more interactive work with the development team, allowing the ideal conditions for engaging quality assurance in each phase of the life cycle. In other words, you will get what you asked for with a lower risk of unanticipated defects or faulty features, which as we discussed above, could negatively impact your end users and your business.
Going alone with a SaaS may not guarantee by default a good quality in your application service, but provides a great encouragement to follow a preemptive quality assurance strategy, which can be accomplished if your SaaS vendor is working with Agile Development approach. A good or poor quality of your software service will impact directly to your customers experience and the perception of your company, remember that a good quality gets built from a preemptive vision.
By Jesús Magaña
SaaS Quality Assurance Team
SaaS Quality Assurance Team
References:
· SaaS in the Enterprise Over the Next Three Years, Jeff Kaplan, THINKstrategies. 2008
· Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility, Shalloway-Beaver. “Chapter 9. The Role of the quality assurance in lean-agile software development”, Net Objectives, 2008.
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Product Manager, What are your customers telling you?
This article about Sage made me chuckle a bit. Sage has implemented IdeaScope from Ryma which is a customer feedback tool for their products. So it makes me wonder, will Sage's customers tell them they want SaaS applications? Their executives seem to have mixed messages after a previous SaaS failure.
I am certain the only reasons Sage hasn't embraced SaaS yet is
1) They have figured out how to protect their revenue source from the traditional license model
2) Technically, they are having challenges.
As for #1, other SaaS vendors are probably taking their market share already so the move could be defensive to minimize the revenue losses to competition. They could also increase their professional services revenue, especially now that they have IdeaScope. Suddently they should have a ton of ideas to act upon.
As for #2, they should just get some quick help.
I am certain the only reasons Sage hasn't embraced SaaS yet is
1) They have figured out how to protect their revenue source from the traditional license model
2) Technically, they are having challenges.
As for #1, other SaaS vendors are probably taking their market share already so the move could be defensive to minimize the revenue losses to competition. They could also increase their professional services revenue, especially now that they have IdeaScope. Suddently they should have a ton of ideas to act upon.
As for #2, they should just get some quick help.
Friday, July 17, 2009
How to Improve Software Product Management
At the very least it seems that better product management tools built tightly into the software products delivered would help facilitate the product management function. If you are member of Linkedin join the "Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Group" and read this excited discussion amongst product managers about the future of Product Managers for SaaS companies
Biggest Challenges for Software Product Managers
What Are the Biggest Challenges for Software Product Managers?
- To know what customers really want
- Solve customers' problems
- Develop a compelling vision of customers existing and future needs
- Align vision and objectives: company, each team, etc (Linking product strategy w/corp strategy)
- Customer satisfaction while simultaneously providing long-term value for the company
- Determine priorities based on input from different customer groups
- Finding common needs of costumers
- Gathering info about end-users (in case that they don´t sell to them)
- Do more with less/Manage products in a truly global marketplace
- Gathering knowledge about the market, competitors and customers
- Align mktg & development requirements and understand what they want/need
- Getting it right the 1st time (because it is cheaper)
Defining the Software Product Manager's Role
To set the stage, let’s agree upon a common definition of a few terms. I’ll use Wikipedia as a reference.
Product Management - is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
Product Marketing - deals with the first of the "4P"'s of marketing, which are Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion. Product marketing, as opposed to product management, deals with more outbound marketing tasks. For example, product management deals with the nuts and bolts of product development within a firm, whereas product marketing deals with marketing the product to prospects, customers, and others. Product marketing, as a job function within a firm, also differs from other marketing jobs such as Marcom or marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, etc. A Product Market is something that is referred to when pitching a new product to the general public.
Software Product Management - is the process of managing software that is built and implemented as a product, taking into account lifecycle considerations and generally with a wide audience. It is the discipline and business process which governs a product from its inception to the market or customer delivery and service in order to generate biggest possible value to the business [1]. This is in contrast to software that is delivered in an ad-hoc manner, typically to a limited clientele, e.g. service.
Role of the Software Product Manager in its traditional on-premise model is defined as:
The product manager leads and manages one or several products from the inception to the phase-out in order to maximize business value. He is working with marketing, sales, engineering, finance, quality, manufacturing and installation to make his products a business success. He has the business responsibility beyond the single project. He determines what to make and how to make it and is accountable for the business success within an entire portfolio. He approves roadmap and content and determines what and how to innovate. He is responsible for the entire value chain of a product following the life cycle and asks: What do we keep, what do we evolve, what do we stop?
Here is a short list of topics how software product managers can deliver better results[1]:
1. Behave like an “embedded CEO”
2. Drive your strategy and portfolio from market and customer value
3. Be enthusiastic on your own product
4. Have a profound understanding of your markets, customers and portfolio
5. Measure your contribution on sales (top-line) and profits (bottom-line)
6. Periodically check assumptions such as business cases
7. Take risks, and manage them
8. Foster teamwork based on lean processes
9. Insist on discipline and keeping commitments
10. Be professional in communication, appearance, behaviors …
This definition doesn’t talk about HOW a product manager achieves his or her objectives.
So, how will the role of the software product manager change with SaaS products?
More to come in the next posting. Stay tuned. This could get interesting.
Product Management - is an organizational lifecycle function within a company dealing with the planning or marketing of a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle.
Product Marketing - deals with the first of the "4P"'s of marketing, which are Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion. Product marketing, as opposed to product management, deals with more outbound marketing tasks. For example, product management deals with the nuts and bolts of product development within a firm, whereas product marketing deals with marketing the product to prospects, customers, and others. Product marketing, as a job function within a firm, also differs from other marketing jobs such as Marcom or marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, etc. A Product Market is something that is referred to when pitching a new product to the general public.
Software Product Management - is the process of managing software that is built and implemented as a product, taking into account lifecycle considerations and generally with a wide audience. It is the discipline and business process which governs a product from its inception to the market or customer delivery and service in order to generate biggest possible value to the business [1]. This is in contrast to software that is delivered in an ad-hoc manner, typically to a limited clientele, e.g. service.
Role of the Software Product Manager in its traditional on-premise model is defined as:
The product manager leads and manages one or several products from the inception to the phase-out in order to maximize business value. He is working with marketing, sales, engineering, finance, quality, manufacturing and installation to make his products a business success. He has the business responsibility beyond the single project. He determines what to make and how to make it and is accountable for the business success within an entire portfolio. He approves roadmap and content and determines what and how to innovate. He is responsible for the entire value chain of a product following the life cycle and asks: What do we keep, what do we evolve, what do we stop?
Here is a short list of topics how software product managers can deliver better results[1]:
1. Behave like an “embedded CEO”
2. Drive your strategy and portfolio from market and customer value
3. Be enthusiastic on your own product
4. Have a profound understanding of your markets, customers and portfolio
5. Measure your contribution on sales (top-line) and profits (bottom-line)
6. Periodically check assumptions such as business cases
7. Take risks, and manage them
8. Foster teamwork based on lean processes
9. Insist on discipline and keeping commitments
10. Be professional in communication, appearance, behaviors …
This definition doesn’t talk about HOW a product manager achieves his or her objectives.
So, how will the role of the software product manager change with SaaS products?
More to come in the next posting. Stay tuned. This could get interesting.
SaaS Product Management
Indeed the role of the product manager is changing with the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). This blog will elaborate on what's causing the changes, who are the champions of the change movement, and what the future vision of the SaaS Product Manager will look like, incorporating SaaS business model best practices.
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