GrapeCity, an award-winning software development firm, offers a variety of services to help its clients develop new products and achieve their business goals.  GrapeCity’s client list includes global brands such as Microsoft, Accenture, Sony, Procter & Gamble, Intel, Mitsubishi, AT&T and Johnson & Johnson.  

GrapeCity specializes in two kinds of projects. First, they work with companies that have ideas for new applications, but have not had a chance to thoroughly define their vision and requirements. Through GrapeCity’s standard processes and iterative development models, GrapeCity helps its clients develop new products that meet their vision.

Second, they proudly work with what they call “burn victims”, organizations that have experienced the pain of previous project failures.   And, can’t we all relate to that?

Usually these failures result from poor processes, a lack of understanding of the vision of the product, or too much emphasis placed on technical coding.  In these cases, GrapeCity reviews the status of projects, pinpoints the causes of failure, and provides remedies to rescue projects hanging on the edge and bring them to successful completion.

With offices around the world, GrapeCity chose Contour because it needed a powerful solution that was Web-based and easily adopted by team members working in different offices, time zones and countries.

GrapeCity now uses Contour to manage the requirements of all their development projects.   With Contour, the learning curve for new users is very fast – in just a few hours of training, they are ready to go.

“In today’s day and age, teams are geographically distributed all over the world. There is a clear need for a requirements management tool that has a rich yet lightweight client that users can use to collaborate. Jama clearly gets it. They understand how a requirements tool should work, ” says, Devinder Singh Josan, Vice President of Engineering at GrapeCity.  Learn more about GrapeCity’s products & services >

Want more info on Contour?

Watch the guided tour video to see how fast, easy and effective Web-based requirements management can be.

Sponsored events, email lists, online ads, paid search - early on, we invested in these standard channels, following the same marketing playbook as most vendors. No surprise, the bulk of our spend was going to Google Adwords, as high as 80% of our monthly spend.

Over time though, the costs increased as companies in our space competed over the top spots. This is great for Google, but it was crushing our performance metrics. Despite ongoing optimization efforts, the average cost-per-click and cost-per-lead metrics grew to be 2-3x our target range. We were investing a lot of money and questioning the real value it delivered back to our business.

We decided to do the unthinkable - we went cold turkey and deactivated our Google Adwords campaign - turning it off completely. Can you really drop Google ads and survive as a business - is that even legal?

We can laugh, but there’s this sense of obligation that as a business, you have to throw money into Google’s deep coffers, like it’s an online tax. We’re not bucking the Google bandwagon to just be different, we’re doing it because it simply wasn’t delivering the ROI we need to achieve our goals.

So, we had an idea. We had been sponsoring Kiva.org for the past few months as an organization we really admire and believe in - they’re the online micro-lending site that helps entrepreneurs in the developing world. And, we wanted to figure out a way to funnel the dollars we were sending to Google ads over to Kiva loans.

We realize we can’t give away money unless we make money. So, the experiment is to see if we can raise enough awareness and trials through this indirect pr channel to replace the paid search ads on Google - If we can, we’ll make it a permanent switch.

In other words, we’d much rather help a chicken farmer in Cambodia feed her village than fund a Google billionaire’s hobby of flying to space.

Here’s how it works:

We call it the “You try. We give.” program. The more people that learn about Jama Software and do a free trial of Contour, the more new customers we sign on. The more our business grows, the more loans we’re able to give to Kiva entrepreneurs.

The program relies on the power of social networking on the Web via blogs, news articles, people passing it along to friends and colleagues in email and word of mouth. So, we’re hitting the phones, sending emails and leveraging our online community to help us see if social marketing can truly outperform search marketing. We believe it can and we need your help to prove it.

“We’re thrilled when a company like Jama Software develops an innovative program that supports both our global mission at Kiva and their own goals.  It’s such a simple  concept, but that’s the  beauty of it,” said Jessica Jackley Flannery, co-founder and chief marketing officer of Kiva.org

If you like the idea, have a need for our product, then do a free trial and pass this blog post along to your social network. Thanks!

Yesterday, Lori Schmall, COO of Grist joined us. Grist is a Seattle based on-line media company focused on the environment. Time magazine recently named Grist the top green web site.

While we like to think and act green as a company – she was quick to point out a few plastic water bottles scattered around the conference room - I think we’ve got some work to do.  Lori’s past life was in senior management at a Fortune 500 technology firm dealing with scenarios that are near and dear to our heart – enterprise product development and project management.

We focused first on our sales presentation.  We’re constantly refining it to better speak to the value of our product, keep the flow engaging and eliminate the bullet points (we believe in a bullet point free world). This reminded me I need to revisit http://www.presentationzen.com/.

Our takeaways from this discussion:

• Get the audience involved as quickly as possible. This helps keep everyone focused and involved in the presentation
• Use stories to illustrate points, it’s much more interesting for everyone
• A little humor never hurts, we all can relate to funny scenarios that we live through

We then turned to the pain of project management. Lori offered up a nice, simplified definition of requirements management: “Delivering what the customer wants”.  This speaks to the broader set of functionality that’s available within Contour.

For Lori, the #1 one pain point is when the team loses sight of what’s important to the customer.  On long, complex projects when things change, it’s easy to get disconnected from what the stakeholders are expecting.  She gave a great metaphor. It’s like an iceberg – the customer defines what they want, but it’s just the visible tip of the iceberg. The development team then has to create and manage through the supporting structure underneath the surface – the mammoth, complicated task of defining use cases, tasks, coding, testing, documenting, deploying to get to the end result of what the customer wants.

The key themes were:

• Visibility into the project – understanding what the status is at all times and who’s doing what
• Alignment – keeping everyone on the same page.

Continuing the metaphor, these strategy sessions with outside executives help us come up for air once and awhile, and keep us focused on the big picture of the value we deliver to customers.  Thanks Lori for your time.

- Tiv Socheat - mother of 2 and chicken farmer in Cambodia
- Elida Angelica Ruiz Cardenas - mother and fish retailer in Peru
- Eliseo Canales - pineapple and dragon fruit farmer in Nicaragua
- Rosemary Rushagara - mother of 4, caretaker of orphaned kids from HIV and store owner in Tanzania
- Nguyen Thi Ngat -daycare provider and educator in Vietnam

and several others…

Who are they? They aren’t customers, employees or partners. They are the first of the Kiva.org loan recipients that we’ve sponsored through our “You try. We give.” program.

What started out as a small idea during a team meeting in February has blossomed into an ongoing program that reflects our corporate values and commitment to giving back on behalf of our customers, partners and other members of our community. For every customer that trials Contour, our collaborative requirements management software, we set aside marketing dollars to donate for loans that help Kiva.org recipients improve their own communities.

We chose Kiva.org because they embody a few fundamental principles that we share:

1. a belief that the entrepreneurial spirit lives in everyone
2. thousands of micro-actions that create a cumulative macro-effect
3. taking a collaborative, Web-based approach to solving a problem
4. an open, global community of people working together for greater success

View our lender page on Kiva: http://kiva.org/lender/jamasoftware

We’re still a young company with limited funds, so as we grow, this program will grow too. We look forward to introducing the new Kiva recipients each quarter. Thanks for showing your support by evaluating Contour and enabling us to help more companies succeed with requirements management.

The example he gave was that Microsoft’s pricing book is over 100 pages long. Ouch!

It solidified for me that we try to maintain in our pricing strategy and overall company philosophy: keep it simple.  Which I will freely admit is easier said than done.  We just lived through this process internally when we revamped our pricing packages for 2008.  What started as a 2-hour meeting turned into a 3-week project over the holidays to get it right.  The lesson we learned is not to tie yourself in knots over every possible scenario, which I’m sure the bigger you get and the broader your product portfolio and customerbase, the greater the challenge.

We modeled our pricing after a couple of companies we admire – Jive Software (makers of collaboration software) and Atlassian (makers of JIRA). As an example, Jive’s product ClearSpace competes with Microsoft. Now, compare Jive’s pricing page with Microsoft’s 100 page (plus) price book and tell me who do you think will be the easier company to deal with?

While I’m sure most customers are getting tired of complicated pricing – we see it in licensing models as well.  We’ve had customers get ecstatic simply because our product isn’t “node locked” (tied to the MAC ID of the computer), or doesn’t require a “dongle key” or connect to a license server at startup to be allocated a key.  Who wants to deal with all that?  How many people even know what a dongle key is, and why should they?  You can laugh, but these models that were prevalent during the 80’s and 90’s are still around. It’s like selling someone a beta max player today for home movies and charging them a ton to service it and pinging them extra for every time their friends come over to watch a movie on it (oh, you want to share it with others, oh well that will cost you more).

As we continue to grow, I’m constantly buying new services, software and products for our company and when I’m on the buying side, I’m instantly reminded just how frustrating it can be when things aren’t outlined clearly to me as a customer. Is our pricing model perfect, no. But I will say we’re open to suggestions and are committed to being as open, progressive and fair with our pricing as possible. It’s what we’d want if we were the customer.

From from our collective conversations with customers, partners and peers (and, of course our own perspectives), we see 2 trends this year worth highlighting here. Yes, we’ll focus on just 2, not everything requires a top 10 list. We like to keep things simple. So, here we go:

1. From buzzwords to reality - the emergence of innovation management.

If 2007 was anything it was the year of buzzwords. And, the kingpin of them - Web 2.0 - spawned many offspring last year. It seemed everything was 2.0-ified: ALM 2.0, PLM 2.0, Project Management 2.0, Innovation 2.0 and on and on and on. Where 2007 was the year of the next big thing, we believe 2008 will be the year of action. The mantra being, Enough talk, let’s get things done.

Specifically, we see 2008 being the year that 3 highly talked about strategic initiatives will converge and materialize into real value for many companies. The big 3 being: Innovation, Collaboration and Community. When integrated, they shape the emerging category of Innovation Management. So what’s new here?

Innovation is a major strategic initiative for over 70% of enterprise organizations and has been a leading cover story over the last few years, BUT success rates are still low for the majority of efforts. Data shows that spending more in R&D isn’t a silver bullet. So, what is? Is it process? Is it people? Is it technology? That’s where collaboration and community come in. These concepts aren’t new either, but where things have recently changed and continue to move is the scale at which collaboration and community are being leveraged within the innovation process to increase success and get closer to what customers really want. The community, or simply put the group of people influencing innovation decisions, is growing to include not only your talented employees and business partners, but now also customers, potential customers, industry influencer’s and many other external audiences with ideas, voices and blogs. And, as you embrace greater collaboration with your ever-growing community, the front-end of the innovation funnel explodes open, and with that, a new challenge emerges: How do you manage all of these ideas? How do you capitalize on them within your product planning and development efforts in an automated way? And very tangibly in era of simply getting things done and done successfully, how do you translate them to specific requirements that will satisfy customer needs and make up the next generation of your products or services? The simplest way to summarize it is - if innovation is the primary goal or what, then collaboration is the how and community is the “who”. And, they work hand-in-hand together to raise success rates. That’s innovation management.

2. Bigger isn’t better - the explosive growth of light-weight, Web-based apps to manage core business processes.

This trend has been underway for a few years, and we see it only accelerating in 2008. It’s a trend sweeping across many technology categories that fuel core business processes, such as ERP, CRM, ALM, PLM and the things close to home for Jama like innovation and requirements management.

OUT are big, bulky, expensive, proprietary suites of applications to manage core business processes.

IN are light-weight, open, flexible, Web-based applications that bring people together, eliminate overhead, integrate well with other tools and make it easier to get things done.

Granted, we’re biased here because this is how we build our tools, such as Contour, but there’s a reason for that. We want to get things done right and help our customers do the same.

Welcome to 2008. Have a great year.

On behalf of the entire Jama Software family, I’d like to simply say, Thanks.  Thanks to our customers. Thanks to our partners. Thanks to everyone who has made an impact on our business in 2007.

It’s been a great year and it’s a wonderful time to celebrate, and we’re just getting started.

It’s our core mission to help smart, innovative companies succeed by providing a more collaborative approach to requirements management. It’s what we’ve playfully dubbed: People against Project Failure, but it’s a commitment we take very seriously. From the way we build Contour to every interaction you have with our team, we want to do everything we can to help you avoid the common challenges and pitfalls that come with the management of complex projects.

We appreciate the opportunity to work with all of you and look forward to great things next year. Have a fun and safe remainder of the holiday season.

Best success in 2008!

We’re excited about the next release as not only does it provide a long list of new features and enhancements, but it also sets in motion a series of strategic releases over the next few months that will include our public web services API, workflow and integrations with other best of breed software.

One of the many enhancements is a visual relationship mapping utility that adds to the ways you can define trace relationships within Contour.

Another one of my favorite small enhancements is the “Add Related” for adding new items with automatic links to your current item. This makes it quick to add bugs that are related to your curren test case, or a new task that is related to a use case and so on.

My other favorite small enhancement is the multi-select update. We knew it was needed and now it’s here.  Stay tuned as we count down the launch to 2.0 next week.

A few years ago, after a frustrating session working with one of our clients expensive, cumbersome requirements management tools I heard the team complaining about requirements being locked away available to only a few users, the pain of installation and how difficult it was to use. I talked with other project managers and we figured there must be a better way. We wanted the benefits of a requirements management tool - but without the overhead and hassle.

Our requirements were simple enough - the tool should be 100% web-based but offer rich functionality like a desktop application, provide a depth of features for serious enterprise product development, be easy to use and affordable - just a few simple things! You can probably guess where this is going - we didn’t find the right solution so we decided to quit our jobs and build it.

On March 13th, 2006 we started designing and building the solution. That date is easy to remember as my son was born that day. I guess he didn’t see the project plan I had put together as he was a week early. One year later we launched our first product, Contour.

The company was started sharing space with a group of financial advisor’s - not a quiet place. We’ve moved 3 times as we grew and already have filled our current office. It helps that we’ve adopted virtual systems - VOIP, Web based CRM, Wiki’s, Contour for product development etc so we can just unplug and move when we need more space. We now have customers from around the world, partners in the UK, Germany and Brazil and will continue to grow the team so we’ll likely be moving again soon.

On the product side, our road map is 100% customer driven and we’ve set an aggressive release schedule with monthly updates to ensure Contour continues to deliver the most value to our customers. I invite you to help us shape the future direction of collaborative requirements management. We recently launched our community site at http://www.jamabackstage.com, so join us in the conversation.

Openness is important to our team as both a corporate philosophy in how we do business, but also as the key driver in how we build our products for our customers. We hope this transparency is apparent in every interaction you have with our team, including this blog post.

John has been a great addition as he gets our philosophy. His goal is to build a community with our users and solve their biggest problems with great web-based applications. He’s already helped us revamp the website, author the whitepaper “Requirements Management Redefined”, and better articulate what we’re all about.