Digité Blog: Prabhas' IT Governance Blog

Global Delivery Model and SLAs -- Do they gel well?

2007-02-07T21:34:00.000-08:00

Ever thought why SLA is needed when one of your IT initiative is being executed and delivered via global delivery model ? Is it worth fretting about SLAs?
My understanding is that people still see outsourcing projects as a consumer product and suffer from "give me a perfect piece else I will ask for money back" syndrome. You have selected a service provider whom you consider is a specialist in the service you want. Instead of tying them down with stringent SLAs, it needs careful management of this relationship. SLAs should not be assumed as something that will meet its levels automatically regardless of how the relationship is managed.
Surveys shows that more than 50% of the IT outsourcing projects fail to meet customers’ expectations , which eventually makes it apparent that in most cases SLAs simply aren’t working. It is obvious to conclude that stringent SLAs may actually be part of the problem rather than the solution.
By pressuring service providers to meet strict time limits you may be encouraging them to cut corners or in no time at all the service provider may start to feel that they can’t win and a quasi-adversarial relationship develops between the customer and service provider.

It is more about customers placing greater trust in the professionalism of their IT service providers. So when you're out there looking for a specialist to do your job, do judge if they are professional enough to cater to your needs.

SLAs are not going to be abolished for the simple fact that it would be needed for some sort of legal recourse when deals go wrong, however, the stakeholders from both the sides should understand that SLAs can not be a replacement for the close monitoring and co-operation. Thereby, see if your service provider has means and tools that would allow you to collaborate with them, get regular visibility into whats going on 10,000 miles away from you so that you can continuously monitor the progress and avoid the need to resort to SLAs.
In one of his interviews, Chairman/CEO/Co-founder of Syntel, Mr Bharat Desai said that "A strong governance model is critical to communication. Syntel's model uses an Engagement Management Office (EMO). The EMO is staffed by both the customer and vendor and manages the relationship, user satisfaction, operations, quality, forecasting, reporting, contract compliance and more. As part of the EMO process, a steering committee with members from both the vendor and client side meet monthly or quarterly to ensure the engagements remain focused, on track and meeting the established service level agreement points."

Paradigm Shift in Software Lifecycle Management

2007-02-06T12:26:00.000-08:00

If you are one of those who started programming 2 decades back, at that time project management was easy and there were hardly any collaboration & process challenges -- ofcourse the programming was the only difficult task. Fast forward.... I was pondering today that how do people see software lifecycle management now? Heard the Disney Song: "It's a whole new world"? Read a few interesting articles on ComputerWorld by Mitch betts. Here are the highlights:

1."Project team members would be thousands of miles away because the business is forcing the organizations to get the best talent, wherever it resides. It is resulting in nightmare in managing the project without the right tools and processes in place."

2. "Time to market is the key to success for business managers but my team that is executing the projects are fretting about the extra 15-20% time they spend on compliance/process related work."

3. "IT would focus on end-to-end processes rather than functional stovepipes, application development would turn into business process delivery. IT would collaborate with the business to design improved business processes, capture the process in metadata that would drive the design and operation of composite applications. Composite would pull together SOA-based business services and modular user interfaces to meet the specific needs and workflow of each business process, giving users integrated, contextual, multichannel access to transactions, content, collaboration, and communications. Business intelligences would close the loop, using process metadata to report process metrics, driving analysis for the next round of business process improvement." -- Randy Heffner, analyst, Forrester Research Inc., Cambridge, Mass.

4. "As application development deals with the pressure of cost reduction and productivity improvement and grapples with compliance issues, development shops will focus more on development planning and process management. They will look at establishing and automating predictable processes and enhancing project management capabilities. As more application development shops fine-tune and improve processes, they will focus on effectiveness factors that impact development projects like communications. In globally sourced development projects there will be an emphasis on global project management like developing cultural intelligence to deal with different cultural, language and communication challenges; and requirements and relationship management skills that will impact project productivity." -- Jack Duggal, managing principal, Projectize Group LLC, Simsbury, Conn.

5. "True globally distributed development shops will require teams to use agile processes to remain competitive. Within the next two years, large corporate IT shops will turn to agile development processes as a means to deliver value to the business and be more responsive to their customers. Drawing largely on experiences from open-source projects, corporate IT managers realize that their traditional approaches aren't cutting it, and that they need to make some pretty significant changes if they are to keep pace with competitive demands. One interesting twist: Outsourcers, and offshore firms in particular, will be pressured to adapt to agile processes as well -- a huge challenge for firms that have made their money on highly productive waterfall processes that meet CMM Level 4 and 5 requirements. Not all will be able to make this transition." -- Liz Barnett, vice president, Forrester Research Inc.

6. "Pressure for increased agility and faster time-to-market will drive the continued focus on agile methods -- though IT organizations will struggle with the shift in development, project management and operational management practices. Rapid, incremental and test-driven development to reduce delivery cycles, with refinement/refactoring, over time will predominate in successful organizations. Integration of agile methods with distributed teams will further force the hard conversations regarding how best to accomplish both." -- David Moore, director of North American branch operations services, Keane Inc., Boston

I also wanted to take this opportunity to comment on my earlier post Perception and results of the Indian IT success story has a gap. Despite all the perception gaps, the success of Indian Services players are primarily because they have understood the above mentioned 6 points very early and very clearly, which indeed is giving them an edge over their contemporaries (ESPs) -- setting up the right tool in their organization that would take care of their collaboration challenges, process standardization, reduced cycle time, and have multiple readymade process templates on various methodologies (waterfall or agile). Digité surely is playing a key role in this business transformation for some of the Indian IT services companies.

Progress Report

2007-02-05T13:10:00.000-08:00

"So how is the company doing ?" -- many of you would ponder before thinking of hedging your bet on us. Here are 5 facts you would consider in inviting us for a discussion:
1) The number of user licenses have gone up by over 400%
2) We work with 2 of BIG FOUR and 4 of top 5 Indian Services giants
3) The product is scalable and our largest installation has over 20k users
4) Gartner has noticed us in their Magic Quadrant report last year and recently talked about us in their "Hype Cycle for Application Development" report.
5) Watch out for the fifth accolade which we will announce in a few weeks time.

CMMI Ver1.2 automation with Digité

2007-02-01T23:01:00.000-08:00

Digité is announcing its latest release this month end that would facilitate quick and smooth implementation of CMMI Ver1.2 level 3 processes. The product will expedite the attainment of maturity, allow SEPG/PMO to model process templates, perform process appraisal, collate process improvement requests and develop action plan for them. Monitoring process performance against organization / process / project / phase level goals would get a lot easier where Hard & soft checks would enable compliance of individual projects with a process template.
On one hand Gartner is emphasizing that software lifecycle management activities are being refined and strengthened to drive more predictability and to meet the challenges of global sourcing, Digité is offering CMMI Ver1.2 automation to emphasize the alignment of the process improvement objectives with organizational business objectives. A quality system being followed manually has higher error margin because each team and Project Manager can have their own interpretation. Maturity attainment is slow and subsequent maturity maintenance is a Herculean Task. Manual, paper-based processes creates silos, which is no way in line with the principle of Global Delivery of Software and Services. Ask for a demo to see how Digité new release would take care of your CMMI Ver1.2 compliance so that you dont have to distract from your primary business -- Application Development, thats where your revenue comes from.

Digité enters Gartner's "Hype Cycle for Application Development"

2007-01-22T06:39:00.000-08:00

Software Lifecycle Management is challenging when people work in the same office. Imagine what happens to complex projects in global delivery model? In December 2006, Gartner published report on “Hype Cycle for Application Development 2006” in which James Duggan, Joseph Fieman and Matt Light commented on Collaborative Tools for the Software Lifecycle Management. The report says that tools like Digité would cater to significant cost savings and revenue and mitigation of the risk posed by the globally distributed teams and globalization of application delivery. Read More . . .

Perception and results of Indian IT success story has a gap

2006-11-18T01:04:00.000-08:00

I was going through a recent research by Gartner wherein they presented some interesting facts about Indian IT Service providers, scanning through the outsourcing lens:
1. Indian companies scale up to 70% when it comes to business expertise.
2. Off-site communication effectiveness is 46% (surprisingly on-site communication effectiveness is 78%)
3. Security Risk is 54%
4. Legal and Regulatory Risk is 60%
5. Foreign Trade and Payments Risk is 54%
6. Infrastructure Risk is 75%
7. Capacity for innovation is 3.75 on a scale of 7
8. Ethical behavior of companies are rated at 4.2 on a scale of 7
9. Government's priority for IT has been rated at 5.7 on a scale of 7

You might be wondering that with so much of not-so-positive flags, the growth in the industry has altogether a different story to tell -- outsourcing is at its peak if you look into some of the biggest deals that Infosys, TCS, Satyam & Wipro have cracked in the last 3-4 quarters.

Where is the gap ? It just can not be the cost advantage. Would look forward to hear from what people have to say.

Digité a cool vendor in Application Development space, says Gartner

2006-10-10T09:10:00.000-07:00

In a recent Application Development (AD) Summit, Gartner talked the various factors that influence Application Development in a collaborative environment including the AD Sourcing cost Model, Inhibitors of globally distributed AD, Communication and Effectiveness of globally distributed AD etc. They have talked about availability of numerous tools from vendors like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Borland, Mercury, Compuware, Serena, however, mentioned that such tools havent transformed into a seamless platform.
They have talked about the requirements for distributed AD and have identified Digité as one of the "cool vendor" among 4-5 other players. Write to me if you would be interested in knowing more about it or even contact Gartner.

IEEE approach to Portfolio Management

2006-07-12T01:55:00.000-07:00

Came across an interesting article by IEEE where the authors have talked about "Picture approach" of Portfolio design in large organizations. The approach focuses on the entire IS portfolio in an enterprise and aims to support decision making on system complexes rather than tweaking IS in parts. You can also download the PDF version of this paper.

Gartner mentions Digité

2006-06-25T20:52:00.000-07:00

Last week Gartner published their 2006 Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Applications, authored by Matt Light and Daniel Stang. According to them "IT-oriented project and portfolio management (PPM) solutions are becoming more comprehensive, ... Interest in enterprise PPM — beyond, but often encompassing, IT — is on the rise." Amongst others, they have mentioned Digité as a key player in the IT-oriented PPM space.

Management of global sourcing initiatives

2006-06-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about the hoopla around Global Delivery of Software and Management of Outsourcing Initiatives. Global outsourcing is here to stay, there are no qualms about it. Simple business case is Cost and productivity benefits that helps to seize the competitive advantage. These benefits seems to be real, but often becomes challenging to materialize. The problem starts where the rubber meets the road. Top 4 in my opinion are:
1) In rush, corporations opt for outsourcing or service providers grab every opportunity without pondering about the disparity in process maturity between service providers (Offshore) and customer (Onshore). Service providers are on the higher side of CMM/CMMI (with most of them being at level 4 or at level 5) whereas outsourcers typically arent at that level.

2) The case of requirements gathering. Service provider's team almost always struggle with specifications ambiguity and constant changes. Project managers on both the sides often struggle to ensure that project priorities are clearly understood and changes to the project plan are clearly agreed upon and communicated at every level, not just at senior management level but also at the lower level.

3)Inadequate Information to the team: Most of the time, resources have very narrow understanding of the bigger picture because it isnt easy to communicate every information that clearly describes the project, what is needed to meet business objectives, risks/issues involved and schedule/milestones/deliverables. Often, critical information is localized only to the project managers or project leaders.

4)Outsourcers as well as service providers often doesnt align themselves to a commonly understood IT process maturity which typically include aggregation of standardized methodologies; continuous process improvement practices; project management skills; change control procedures; portfolio management and service-level agreements.

The 4 challenges that I have mentioned can only be taken care of if teams on both the sides have 24x7 access to the project/process information and work on the same workbench. Lack of readiness in any of these areas will result in lost productivity, repeatitive change and a suboptimal result.

Long time . . .

2006-06-09T08:28:00.000-07:00

Apologies for being incommunicado for quite some time. Had been caught up at personal front(having been blessed with a little angel a few weeks back) as well as the new product release with our CMMI offering. Meet us at China International Software & Information Service Outsourcing Summit where we will showcase the new release for the first time. Along with this, you will also have the opportunity to hear what our CEO (who is a keynote speaker at the conference)has to say about "Quality Frameworks - Key to Global Outsourcing and Offshoring success".

Will touch base again with more . . .

Next Generation of Software LifeCycle Management

2006-03-08T22:05:00.000-08:00

While interacting with a few big corporations on the importance of buying a product of Digité Enterprise genre to cater to their application development, many times I have heard from them that they would or are developing such products on their own. We did argue about the additional work load on the application owners, lack of cost transparency from such initiatives, freeing time to focus on business tasks etc. On a few occassions, some of them got back to us to try out our product. Here is an interesting article from McKinsey on the next generation of in-house software development that talks about the advantages of buying software applications off the shelf rather than developing them in-house. (You might have to register to read this article) but worth a read.

CMMI to ITIL: An obvious graduation?

2006-02-17T09:49:00.000-08:00

IT organizations striving to improve their business should or must be looking for various models and frameworks beyond CMMI. ITIL is the obvious next step. While CMMI is focused towards software development,maintenance, product inegration etc., ITIL provides a framework specifically developed for IT Service Management and operations. IT Services Management is being increasingly adopted by organizations to ensure that the IT processes are closely aligned to business processes and that IT delivers the correct and appropriate business solutions whether it is for Corporate Business Change Plans or Outsourced Application Management or Outsourced Infrastructure Management or BPO.

Important question then to answer is:
How to get the best RoI from the efforts of implementing these models? Is there
any relationship or overlapping among these frameworks?

With our CMMI implementation, we also answered these questions.
There is definite scope of mapping between ITIL processes and various CMMI practices.
To give a heads-up, some of the key CMMI processes that maps to the ITIL processes are:
Project Planning
Project Monitoring and Control
Integrated Project Management
Measurement & Analysis
Configuration Management
Requirement Management/Development
Risk Management
Validation
Product Integration etc.

And they map to ITIL processes like:
Problem Management
Helpdesk
Incident Management
Change Management
Configuration Management
Service Level Management
Planning and Control
Contigency Planning
Security Management
Availability Management
Capacity Management etc.

Digite's Universal Process Framework makes it all the more easy to implement ITIL process templates. However, one caution: Amidst all the process improvement framework, one shouldnt get into "process obsession" mode. Assess the level of risk in the processes, the need for the extent of management control and regulatory requirements and focus on "just enough processes" -- facilitate the process improvement to make a significant difference in your IT services delivery or business performance, instead of overburdening yourself with process mania.

IT Governance and Application Development

2006-02-10T07:23:00.000-08:00

If you are thinking of maximizing the business value of your IT capital allocations, attention has to be given on IT processes and their automation to avoid risks due to weak IT controls.

Organization must look at their IT Governance initiative in line with following business drivers:
i) Business planning,
ii) Application Lifecycle Management,
iii) IT operations and
iv) Outsourcing Governance

For (i) & (ii), integration of project portfolio management and application lifecycle development processes should be coordinated by template processes to encourage enterprise wide adoption.
PPM would not only help in business planning (i) but would also bring out the
value of application development (ii). With such closed loop mechanism,
organizations can demonstrate the value of project investments and learn from successful and failed capital allocations.

Keeping in mind the globally distributed nature of the business environment and outsourcing governance, global delivery model framework should be worked upon where Application LifeCycle processes can be managed via CMMI while ITIL can be implemented for (iii), specifically IT service management.

Overall this approach will help in prioritization of organization’s IT projects and programs and will give competitive advantage and efficiencies of scale.

contd: IT Portfolio Management and its flavors

2006-01-27T04:16:00.000-08:00

This is in continuation of my previous post on IT Portfolio Management and its flavors where people have requested for expanding this topic. So here it is what I have gathered from my interaction with a few analysts. . .
IT Portfolio Management can be comprised of:
>> New Initiatives
>> Infrastructure Investments
>> Externally mandated initiatives
>> Current Investments

These results in various flavors of Portfolio Management that I have talked about. Lets look at them one-by-one.
You can read about ERP for IT in this journal.

1) Project Portfolio Management
Purpose is:
>> to manage New Initiatives or Projects currently underway
>> to monitor activity and resource information

Goal is:
>> Elimination of redundancy
>> Better resource utilization
>> Real-time business value metrics

2) Application Portfolio Management
Purpose is:
>> to inventory existing apps and tie them to business processes
>> deliver management intelligence about apps

Goal is:
>> Better alignment of maintenance and renewal decisions with business goals
>> Disaster recovery and business continuity planning

3) Enterprise Infrastructure Portfolio Management
Purpose is:
>> to Manage IT Assets
>> to Deliver system performance information

Goal is:
>> Better License Compliance
>> Better maintenance and replacement requirements for improved utilization

whereas I can sum up IT Lifecycle Management as a combination:
1) Project Portfolio Management
2) SLA Management and
3) Collaborative Development

If you have apetite for more then I would recommend getting hold of any analysts from Gartner, IDC or Forrester to brief you about it or better procure a few of their reports for details.

Is it simple to understand the importance of IT Governance now?

2006-01-21T05:01:00.000-08:00

I have been talking to lots of people while traveling across India about IT Governance. Some understood its importance, while others didnt. Let me share this story and see if this drives the message (Business Alignment of IT):

I had a frustating experience with a cellular company.
i) Everytime I call their call-centre, NEW reps would ask me to explain the problem -- again n again n again. This was an annoying experience. This company probably has no issue/incident logging mechanism nor do they give issue number for future reference. Or if they have it then there is no mandate by business stakeholders of its proper usage.

ii) Whenever I asked for the Value Added Services, I was told that it takes 4 hours to activate such services. Most of the time such services wont be available even after 12 hours of the request. The company reps didnt know what SLA means when I confronted them with the term.

iii)Once I had made a payment by cheque which was lost by them. When I was apprised of the non-payment (ofcourse the company didnt accept the fact that they had lost my cheque NOR DO THEY GIVE RECEIPT FOR PAYMENT BY CHEQUE), I made another successful payment the very next day. After a few days of this payment, collection agency was running after me for collecting the payment.

After much pursuasion I got to talk to one of their senior/middle managers about governance in their company, she had no clue of what I was talking about. Somehow I was able to convince them that I had a genuine case and when I insisted, I was paid for the mental harassment. Not only this, I walked out of their network as a disgruntled consumer.

iv) More interestingly, while all this was going on, their Sales reps kept calling me to see if I can bring my family members to their network.

This experience was an interesting one for me because the senior management of the company probably were not able to see that their "IT" isnt aligned with their "BUSINESS" departments(Help Desk, Billing, Collection and Sales) that well.

The company has 10million consumers. Lets say 5% of the consumer are not happy and the company pays compensation of $50 (either a gift cheque or free calls/SMS or some other kind of waivers) to 1% of the consumers every year. Also take into account that 1% disgruntled consumers walk out of their network and there is a loss of $200 per year per consumer. You do the maths (probably a hit of $25Mn/year to their revenues ?)whether it makes sense to have a strong IT Governance initiative installed in this organization. I dont think I need to stress upon the cut throat competition we see in customer acquisition in this industry.

Recently I read in the media that this company put a lid over the controversy involving its accounting practice quoting that differences were purely technical in nature and have no bearing on operational performance the company.

How to get benefits of PPM and Collaborative Development?

2006-01-10T04:02:00.000-08:00

This post is in continuation of my earlier post on Benefits of Portfolio Management and Collaborative Development. Recently I read about Enterprise Unified Process (EUP). The author, Scott Ambler, talks about using Enterprise disciplines like Portfolio Management, Enterprise Business Modeling, Resource Management etc. in tandem with Rational Unified Process (RUP) or Agile Unified Process (AUP) which he calls as EUP. An interesting read.

Digité's Universal Process Framework provides a platform for implementing concepts like EUP or any other SDLC methodologies alongwith PPM,and the CMMI framework for Software Process Improvement -- this flexibility is what makes Digité unique.

Scott has spent lots of time in explaining some key concepts on the topic and Software Process Improvement. Would recommend reading his works. I am putting it up for people to read in detail and understand how they can derive benefits of using PPM in tandem with software lifecycle management.

IT Portfolio Management and its flavors

2006-01-05T02:21:00.000-08:00

Talking about the IT and in the last few quarters Portfolio Management has evolved from simplistic Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to more complex Integtrated IT Management (IIM). IT Governance is spawning up acronyms every other day. Thought would brief them for you all to be in sync with the fast moving trend. Lets have a look at various flavors that has been talked about:
1) ERP for IT
2) Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
3) Application Portfolio Management (APM)
4) Enterprise Infrastructure Portfolio Management (EIM)
5) IT LifeCycle Management (ITLM)
6) Integrated IT Management (IIM)

I am not delving into details unless some of you might want me to expand on it. To sum it up, IIM is being purported as the natural evolution of these disparate blocks into a single,comprehensive and cohesive offering that provides holistic view of IT activities to various stakeholders.

2006 Zodiac forecast for Head of IT

2006-01-01T02:58:00.000-08:00

Venus suggests you should focus on IT Governance this year. Uranus' influence on you would be the cause of the discovery and development of new technologies. Identify various areas that needs a face lift and dont lay all your eggs in one basket. Introduce applications to improve productivity. Compliance would be the next important responsibility for you. The four elements predict that recognizing that change is not all bad. Accept the freedom and individual purpose that it brings could be your ongoing life’s work. With squeezed budgets, outsourcing and offshoring would be prominent on “to do” list. Emphasis would shift from “cutting cost” to deliver and demonstrate value for spending.

Western as well as Chinese astrology says that IT isn’t that simple as it might appear, challenges would stem from the complexity of the infrastructure, the myriad of applications/tools, processes and different solutions -- start small, and be steadfast and spiral into success.

This Reading is generic, to start living up to your potential
have your personal chart done now.

IT Risk Management

2005-12-26T01:54:00.000-08:00

If you haven’t figured out a way to have a holistic view of your IT risks then it is more than likely that the new year would usher in with challenging business environment. What are the chances? Probably more than 75%.

So whats the first step? Work with your SEPG/PMO set up a risk committee who would identify, define and record risks for the enterprise. You might want to read my previous post Who is “Managing IT through IT”

Secondly, the risk committee must consolidate, assess and analyze the historical data so that all the projects in the enterprise can benefit from it. Categorize the risks, assign a probability of occurrence, risk exposure, its severity and effect, source, mitigation and contingency plan and finally how must did it or would it COST.

Lastly, maintain Risk indicators and monitor is religiously and simultaneously share the information among functional areas to support better risk management throughout the enterprise.

Risk Management with Digité Enterprise provides Process Asset Library that enables SEPG/PMO identify, define, assess and analyze the risks. It also provides risk indicators for better visibility into the risks. Being an integrated application lifecycle management framework, sharing the information among a globally distributed team is just a mouse click away. This recognizes and addresses problems before they can threaten the success of the project.

Benefits?
i) Readymade risk repository to assist project managers to avoid cost overruns.
ii) Controlled scope creep to minimize the failure of enterprise projects.
iii) Better SLAs management by faster response to customers and enhanced customer service.

Is Visibility and Traceability important to you?

2005-12-19T01:54:00.000-08:00

Imagine you are about to deploy a business critical application to the production environment or deliver a project to your customer and your product testing or quality assurance team suddenly notifies you of a showstopper in one of the areas of the product. This probably calls for either modifying the database or adding new business logic or modifying the UI. What more ? Look for an excuse to apprise the end users that there is a delay in the launch date. Where do you begin? Is there an on-spot visibility into this sudden challenge? Did you miss something in your planning to meet the delivery schedule and hand over an application that does what it was supposed to do?

You probably hit this tight bend for two reasons: You don’t have the right visibility into project execution or evenif you have, you cant conduct a traceability analysis -- a very valuable but seldom used technique in today’s development processes.

Project Managers would argue that it takes extra time and effort to keep up with the requirement's traceability, as well as increased maintenance effort in a system that evolves through numerous changes for future releases. Whether this is a real or perceived negative is up to the project team to debate on, the effort to perform traceability is not negative if the information captured is used in the future to save the time and effort. The truth is that this perceived negativity means costly rework and schedule slippage.

Traceability in Digité Enterprise has been designed keeping in mind its importance and challenges a project manager faces despite his best intent. Every requirement agreed upon before and during the development of an application should have something designed or delivered to satisfy that requirement. Digité Enterprise traceability offers considerable benefits for your project:

• Requirements Specifications, statements of work, or informal discussions/communications frequently have requirements outlined as a set of obligations to your customer. A good traceability avoids a breach of the customer agreement.

• Good Traceability also helps coming up with the best of the designs and deliver a quality solution once your architect has the complete information to design.

• By appropriately tracing your requirements to designs and test cases, you can immediately determine what has to be revisited up the traceability tree as a result of change requests and thereby attaining a better change management process. In the process your configuration management also becomes much more robust and easier to maintain.

• A simple traceability report saves a project by unearthing potential problems early in the development cycle and minimizes the time and money spent on reworks. With Digité Enterprise Traceability feature, one can verify that all requirements have been satisfied. You are no more expected to remember everything the client or the end-user wants.

All these benefits ultimately result in shorter development cycles and more on-time deliveries. Last but not the least, you build credibility with your end users by giving them the targeted & verifiable information if something hits a tight bend. They will trust you when you assert that it would just take 4 days to fix this glitch.

Benefits of Portfolio Management and Collaborative Development

2005-12-12T03:01:00.000-08:00

PPM (Project Portfolio Management) provides insight into application development from the planning and strategic level. It ensures transparency in investment and capital decisions, manages the risks of those investments, and maximizes return on investments.
However the PPM solution doesnt provide the EXECUTION PLATFORM for the strategically funded projects that are either developed internally or outsourced. If PPM is a solution to enable senior management to minimize risks and do a strategic investment, the SDLC framework enables the PMO office to execute the projects and track it at minute details. Thus to understand the value of the business derived from application development, it is important to incorporate a framework that enables the organization to have a feedback loop and understand what is happening to promote tighter control.
Corporations that is managing everything internally can use a product like Digité Enterprise to get an end-to-end handle on their IT investments. If they are already using the PPM tool then they can connect the SDLC framework of Digité Enterprise to the earlier procured PPM tool.
Corporations outsourcing the application development can mandate theservice providers to use Digité Enterpise so that they can monitor what service providers do to its projects and establish and monitor service-level agreements (SLAs).
On the other hand, Service Providers can use Digité Enterprise for a better execution ofthe outsourced deal and go up the ladder of relationship management. These service providers can also use the PPM capability to get an insight into their own business.
Its all about bringing the board room and shop floor on the same plane. And then the CIO can demonstrate better visibility, drawn from dashboards, to executive management about what’s really happening in IT.
Digité Enterprise provides a unique combination of PPM and Collaborative development with seamless SLA management. This enables the business value of application development to be owned by the business.

RoI by using Digité Enterprise for CMMI/CMM

2005-12-07T19:37:00.000-08:00

When it comes of benefits of using CMMI, there is no debate. We understand it very well what value CMMI brings to Process efficiency, rework, predictability and repeatability of processes. Questions that people have asked me is that how can one predict a RoI from CMMI. It has varied from enterprise to enterprise depending upon how they have gone about implementing it and the commitment there upon. On an average, statistics from Software Engineering Institute (SEI) indicates that there is a 35% increase in productivity, close to 40% reduction in rework and 20% reduction in time to market. Savings vs Cost of this process improvement framework has been 5-1 (thumb rule). The best that I have read was a report by DoD Data & Analysis Center for Software (DACS) that found RoI of 21:1.
In a nutshell, RoI on CMMI/CMM is a proven and tested fact.

How does Digité Enterprise go about bringing additional benefits on this RoI ? Even though organizations that have implemented CMMI/CMM acknowledge that there are some overheads and we work on those cost factors by:

• minimizing the Documentation effort
• minimizing the costs of data collection and analysis
• providing better Quality control oversight
• minimizing the training costs for new hires especially in an industry where attrition rate is very high
• minimizing the compliance costs for the staffs, in terms of time spent on conforming to the process

CMMi Automation Vs Paper based compliance

2005-11-15T00:35:00.000-08:00

I had an interesting discussion with a very senior executive of a very reputed organization. I wont be able to quote his name but rest assured that he is one of the authority on the topic on which I am blogging. I was talking to him about automation of CMMi and he said "People do a great deal of disservice by saying this because CMMi is about people and processes". He mentioned that CMMi cant be automated and I have a strong reason to have a different opinion than his.

I would say that paper based CMMi templates have done a great job allowing organizations to define their processes but have also contributed to creating silos and obscuring real time visibility for the stakeholders. Those numerous forms that gets filled
i) is expensive to store and it usually gets stored only at one place.
ii) In a globally distributed team, we can not access it as easily as it should be, it introduces delays and re-work.
iii) Sure it caters to a process but there is no way to track where the documents are in a process.

Thus the true value is trapped in silos.

It makes a case for CMMi automation for the following simple reasons:
i) to know "What was not done" as CMMi prescribed.
We are talking about audit at the minute level:
How many times a document was updated, when and by whom ?
How many times a guideline set up by PMO/SEPG was bypassed, when, by whom and under what circumstances?
ii) have a quantitative approach to process improvement, which not only you can see but others too can see and verify easily.
iii) to sustain and maintain the repeatability of processes and
iv) enterprise wide single interpretation of the processes.

Paper based CMMi gave us a marketing fad to win businesses but its about time to automate and actually enhance our capabilities to execute to our commitment. This would also be handy in your IT Governance vision. A typical example would be HIPAA mandates compliance where every activity log needs to be recorded, tracked and reported on.

It would improve your ability to take up questions and more importantly your confidence in answering the questions. It would also reduce the costs and risks associated with paper based CMMi adherence.

You're most welcome to call upon our sales guys to show this to you in Digité Enterprise and decide what kind of your burden is taken off by automating CMMi processes.

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