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.

As a smart business, the bigger questions are:  How can you thrive during tough times?  Do you cut spending? Do you freeze budgets?  Do you take a wait and see approach? Isn’t that what other companies are doing?

If you listen to the financial wizard Warren Buffett or follow the contrarian path of several innovative companies, they do just the opposite.  It makes sense really.  When others are cutting back because of economic fears, they see this as an opportunity to create value by increasing investments in areas that can fuel growth and create operational efficiencies for their businesses - from technology to processes to new product development.

As Mr. Buffett likes to say, “Be fearful when others are greedy, and be greedy when others are fearful.”

So, how does this relate to our world of software product development?  More specifically, what’s the value of requirements management - or any tool for that matter - in a down economy?

In theory, an investment in a requirements management tool will create efficiencies, eliminate costly errors and ensure higher quality products.  But is that just theory, or does it hold up in the real world?  The only way to find out is to explore it for yourself.

To help though, we’ve done the math using an ROI model developed for Software Quality Engineering (Stickyminds.com) by Richard Denney, a well-respected industry expert.  Based on a team of 10 active users and 10 stakeholders, with 2,500 requirements (500 of which are implemented in the 1st year) and industry averages for a few other variables, the model shows you can achieve $300,000 in cost savings with a requirements management tool in the first year versus not using one at all; creating a 4:1 cost-to-benefit ratio.

Now, requirements management won’t make headline news, but the return on investment both immediate and long-term can be significant - if done well.  And, if you think about it, that’s exactly the kind of unsexy, penny-wise investment that a Mr. Buffet-like investor might consider.

Make the penny-wise case for RM at your company:

Download the Requirements Management ROI Analysis (.pdf)

Learn about the Contour Team Package and how to save 40%

Note: If you’d like the Excel version of the ROI model to play with the variables, just email me.

]]> http://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2008/11/18/whats-the-value-of-requirements-management-in-a-down-economy/feed/ http://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2008/11/17/the-5-signs-you-know-you-need-web-based-requirements-management/ http://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/2008/11/17/the-5-signs-you-know-you-need-web-based-requirements-management/#comments Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:11:13 +0000 John http://www.jamasoftware.com/blog/?p=93

If you’re like 80% of companies, you’re still using documents, spreadsheets and email to manage product requirements.  It’s easy enough.  You fire up Microsoft Word, you start writing your Software Requirements Specification (SRS) or the Product Requirements Document (PRD).  When you’re done, you email it to the team, maybe post the content up on a Wiki or in a document management system.  No problem, right?

What happens when change occurs and the document is 200-pages long because what you’re building is a complex software product?  When do you reach the tipping point of needing a specialized solution for managing all the requirements and scope of what you’re building?

In the vein of a classic Cosmo article, here are the 5 tall tale signs you know you need an extreme make-over.  Umm, sorry, we mean you need Web-based requirements management…

1. Complexity.

Rule of thumb:  The more complex the project, the greater the need.

The complexity of software products is doubling every 2-3 years.  If you’re managing development projects with hundreds or thousands of requirements, you’re ready.

Benchmark:  72% of teams have projects that have at least 100+ requirements.  For 5% of companies, their average project has over 5,000 requirements.

2. Team Size Matters.

Rule of thumb:  The bigger the team, the greater the need.

If you’ve ever worked on a large team, you know that keeping everyone on the same page is a never-ending challenge.  If your team exceeds 10 or includes someone as disorganized as me, you’re ready.

Benchmark:  Over 40% of teams have at least 25 members and stakeholders.

3. Location, Location, Location.

Rule of thumb:  The more geographically distributed you are, the greater the need.

Teams today are virtual, working from offices in different time zones and countries.  If 10% of more of your team is virtual, you’re ready.  The single whiteboard of requirements and development tasks on sticky notes just won’t work anymore.

Benchmark:  Over 60% of teams have at least 10% of their team working in different locations.

4. Change Happens.

Rule of thumb:  The more change you have to manage through, the greater the need.

Requirements aren’t “artifacts”, that would imply they don’t change.  Requirements in today’s world are alive - they grow, they change, they evolve over time.  Managing revision after revision of requirements specification documents is painful, both for the author and the recipients trying to decipher what changed.  If you spend 10% or more of your week dealing with changes to requirements, you’re ready.

Benchmark: Over two-thirds of teams spend at least 10% of their time just managing changes to requirements.

5. The Other “F” Word - Failure.

Rule of thumb:  The lower the success rate, the greater the need.

Don’t worry, this isn’t group therapy, we all know the historical failure rates for software projects.  If your last project didn’t end well, then you already know you’re ready.

Benchmark:  Three out of four teams have a success rate of 60% or less, so you’re not alone.

Note: these benchmarks are from the industry survey data available in the 2008 State of Requirements Management Report.

So, how did you score?

If you’re experiencing 2 or more of these signs, then it might be time to explore using a specialized product requirements management tool.  There are a few 3rd-party sites that provide the full list of tools available:   Laatuk, INCOSE, and Jiludwig.

At Jama, we can help you with product requirements management.  Now, when it comes to the Cosmo extreme make-over, you’re on your own.

These are a few of the questions we explored in a recent survey with product managers, project managers, business analysts, development directors and executives responsible for the planning and development of new software products and systems at their respective companies.

Download the full report, “The 2008 State of Requirements Management Report” and discover the latest trends in software product development.

A snapshot of the findings:

• Challenges: There’s no substitute for fundamentals. The top 3 challenges to innovation were: gaining a clear understanding of customer needs, documenting all the requirements and ensuring what’s being built is what was planned.
• Metrics: Which success metric is most important? Revenue? Buzz? Time to market? Customer satisfaction is #1 to business analysts and project managers; revenue was most important to product managers and executives. Team alignment to same goals and metrics is key.
• Risks: Beware of scope creep. Scope creep tops the list as the #1 cause for project failure. Followed closely by “missed or poorly defined requirements” and “unrealistic schedules and expectations”.
• Processes: There’s a lot of mojo around Agile processes, in fact we use a modified Agile process ourselves, but only 6% of organizations have shifted to being a pure Agile shop. Most organizations are using a mix of processes, so it’s important that the tools you use be flexible to work for different processes.
• Tools: Over 80% of professionals still manually use MS Office to capture and communicate requirements using basic documents and spreadsheets. When you think about it, those are the same tools our kids use to do their homework. However, when asked which tools they plan to use or would like to use this year, Requirements Collaboration and Management tools top the list.

Join over 1,500 other professionals and download your free copy of the report.

Let us know what you think. Are the survey results surprising in anyway? Does the report validate things you already knew? How do these trends map to what you’re doing at your company?

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!

As the products we’re all building become more sophisticated as stand-alone software applications or embedded software within physical products, it’s common for development projects to consist of hundreds or thousands of requirements and other related items.

So, how do you keep track of everything when changes occur? That’s where traceability comes in.

Traceability helps you create relationships between requirements, use cases, test cases, tasks and any other items within a project, and across multiple projects, so when changes occur, as they often do, you can easily

• Assess the impact
• Keep the team aligned
• And, keep the project on track

Our philosophy for building the traceability features within Contour is “make it powerful, but keep it simple.”

And, the reason for our obsession with simplicity is because setting up trace relationships involves some time upfront to reap the benefits later on in the project life-cycle. So, the big question often becomes, “Is traceability worth the effort?”

What we’ve tried to do differently is make this process as fast and simple as possible within Contour, so it’s no longer a question of whether “it’s worth it” to do traceability. To illustrate our approach, we put together this short video.

Is traceablity valuable to your team? Is it hassle? We’re curious what you think.

- 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.