New functionality provides an enhanced user experience.
Morrisville, NC -- 6th Sense Analytics, Inc., a provider of unbiased data and metrics into the status of outsourced software development projects, today announced numerous enhancements to its flagship solution. 6th Sense Analytics offers critical insight and metrics by automatically and unobtrusively collecting unbiased activity-based data throughout the entire software development lifecycle.
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The debate about sending IT work overseas has moved out of the political arena and turned into economic and structural discussion. This piece from IT News crystallizes that debate by talking about some of the mistakes organizations make outsourcing and some of the common challenges.
Outsourcing typically goes wrong when delays occur, you get poor-quality programming, and support and operational costs increase. These problems crop up when there’s a lack of skills, planning or infrastructure to manage the outsourcing relationship.
This paragraph in particular stood out:
“Most companies looking to outsourcing or distributed development continue to have unrealistic expectations or insufficient processes and infrastructure to adapt to this new development paradigm. Many simply adopt inefficient manual processes (e.g. more meetings, more travel) to manage the challenges of distribution, or turn away from the problem altogether, unable to see a viable, short-term solution to solve the pains of distributed development.”
That’s important because it gets to the heart of the issue: innovation.
6th Sense’s hosted an online debate this week on building software in a flat world. Among the points raised… the need to innovate and add modern practices to a discipline that’s hardly changed for decades.
Metrics are a vital component of any modern process because they help you establish a real-world infrastructure to manage outsourced projects. Metrics that are captured at the developers’ desktop in particular are the key to progress. They let you know what’s really going, so you can conduct due diligence on your current infrastructure and establish metrics to manage the new relationship.
As Delphi Group founder and Smartsourcing author Thomas Koulopoulos said during our web cast, these are early days for taking this modern approach, but things are clearly changing. Koulopoulos characterized it as the birth of printing: “We are at the very beginning of making a true science of application development and automation technology. We like to think we are much further along - [however] we are at the stage where Gutenberg invented the press rather then Heidelberg mass presses,” Koulopoulos said. Bring on the industrial revolution.
This week we heard the death rattle of a dying breed. Vodafone, the world’s largest cell phone company, signed a seven-year application development outsourcing deal with services giants IBM Global Services and EDS estimated to be worth more than $2bn. The companies will also provide application maintenance in eleven countries.
Five years back, mega deals were all the rage. According to separate reports from IDC and Technology Partners International (TPI) last month customers are now signing up to shorter contracts. Five to seven years, instead of seven to 10. TPI thinks we could even see sub-five-year deals. TPI said $1bn plus deals are at their lowest point in four years. IDC said such deals fell 3.1% in 2005. Mini deals are up: contracts worth less than $250m were up to 23% in 2005 from eight percent the previous year.
Smaller deals and more of them - a blessing and a curse.
Small deals mean suppliers must prove value and return on investment sooner than ever before. That accentuates the issue of how to measure and demonstrate value. Traditionally, project reporting software is used with other techniques. This can take time to bed down and fine tune… time service providers no longer have. Such tools are also notoriously bad at providing an accurate picture of events, which becomes a critical liability in short projects.
This trend is creating a growing demand to measure projects using real-life metrics gathered from the developers’ desktop and viewed in real-time. Such an approach provides the immediacy and clarity needed to measure and manage short-term engagements, which are the equivalent of a hurdle race versus the marathon run of mega projects. One minute mis-calculation or oversight in a hurdle race, and down you go - you’ve lost. In the marathon even if you go down, you stand a chance of getting back up, re-adjusting and coming from behind.
Who works in a learning organization? OK - what is a learning organization?
That’s the subject of Peter M Senge’s The Fifth Discipline, which explains organizations most likely to survive against the competition are those that encourage and capture new patterns of thought and nurture an on-going desire to learn from past experience. This helps repeat successes and avoid failures.
The Fifth Discipline outlines the five steps organizations should take to become smart learners. As the title suggests, it is the fifth discipline that’s the hardest to master: combining all those smaller experiences and wisdoms into one big picture.
Senge’s book has proved something of a management classic since first appearing in the early 1990. However, the book’s message applies strongly to application development. It’s that ability to record and learn from experience gained in previous software projects that is so basic and yet that has proved elusive.
Thinking like Senge’s marries with the 6th Sense philosophy. Giving organizations visibility into projects using metrics and tools helps capture past performance and will help turn IT shops and businesses into dynamic learning organizations.
Importantly, 6th Sense helps make that difficult fifth step - connecting the dots. Senge-like thinking and 6th Sense practice are going to become indispensable as software becomes more critical to the running of business.
Mark Twain once reflected on the relative nature of numbers, popularizing the phrase: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.”
Anyone whose ever commissioned or read the results of a research poll will know numbers can be sliced in different ways, to produce different meanings or interpretations. Twenty five percent of people like the taste of New Coke can be taken as quarter of consumers like the taste of New Coke or three quarters don’t like New Coke. (On this one, at least, we can say we know how consumers really felt.)
ComputerWorld’s Jerri Ledford has been ruminating on the nature of
meaningful metrics. Jerri’s conclusion is simple: the value of the metrics depends on the job at hand or the problem you are trying to solve. That’s not exactly rocket science, but its a useful check point.
According to one blogger responding to Jerri’s piece, to get meaningful metrics the metric definition process itself should be a journey not a destination. In other words, keep refining your metrics and re-modeling the benchmarks that use your numbers. He advises revisiting metrics quarterly or semi-annually noting the “relationship between information consumers and producers should not be taken lightly.”
That’s sound advice. Often, in software development, there’s a temptation to monitor and steer projects using benchmarks from third parties or by re-using metrics from other, older projects. No wonder things can, and do, go wrong. The reporting software might say everything is going well, yet you are experiencing slowdowns and the software is late. That’s no great surprise, if the metrics your system is calibrated on are old or irrelevant. It’s like navigating using a faulty compass.
For metrics to be meaningful and helpful in software projects, organizations should never assume they have all the metrics they need. Continue to harvest new data and refine the model that project assumptions and projections rely on. In short: never reach your destination, just enjoy the journey.
[metrics] [software] [development]
IS Survivor has delivered a software project management reality check for organizations putting process before people. Externally devised best practices and processes are something of a bug bear because they don�t take into account the subtle nuances of how individuals in real-life IT teams work.
Summarizing IS Survivor: the best-run software projects - like companies - are those where management builds relationships with people rather than relying on workflows or project reporting tools to steer things or find out what�s going on.
One piece in IS Survivor in particular resonated with us:
“Project teams, like all organizations, are intensely human activities. For some unaccountable reason, many project management methodologies, business schools, and entire consulting practices ignore this simple, inescapable fact. They view the enterprise one dimensionally, as collections of processes, or cash flows, or value chains, knowable through reports, dashboards and scorecards.
Some project managers, IT managers, business managers and executives fall into this trap, mistaking reports for the state of the business. Presumably, when on vacation, they similarly mistake the map for the countryside.”
It’s true. There is a tendency for big vendors and consultants to apply their own processes and methodologies to their customers� projects, with the processes mandating what steps should be taken, and when, and the process delivered through application development or reporting tools. It’s no wonder so many software projects either run late or leave the customer feeling dissatisfied with the end results, because features they wanted don’t get delivered or don�t work.
Rather than plugging into process, organizations should try to understand and exploit their existing, but probably hidden, project biorhythms and make these their workflows and processes. And where it’s difficult to maintain personal relationships with staff — the kind IS Survivor believes are important — then metrics-based tools should be used that are capable of communicating to management what’s happening and that help team leaders proactively support developers in real-time.
The message? Software development is a people business. The reporting tools companies use to run software development projects should reflect this fact.
This article on call-center CRM popped up on the radar. While the piece talks of the challenge in monitoring and managing call center agents, one paragraph in particular caught our eye.
Analyst Gartner: “Cautioned contact centers and enterprises to listen closely to whenever a vendor uses the term ’suite,’ as many bundled offerings now on the market actually consist of components that were built using a variety of tools. As a result these offerings are more ‘portfolios’ than they are suites, resulting in countless administration environments, support complexities and overlapping functionalities that are both unnecessary and costly.”
Anyone who’s wrestled with application development and reporting suites will recognize this parallel. IT vendors have grown their development and reporting “suites” through the years and during multiple acquisitions. The result? Tools that were intended to help reporting on projects that actually hinder the process and cost money into the bargain (through licensing and support). These tools fail to collect data in real time while lack of integration with the rest of the portfolio makes its difficult for customers to filter data or access information in real time.
The suites argument has always been something of a smoke screen by IT vendors. It’s time to get back to tools that actually do what they say on the packet.
With IT under growing pressure to provide better value for money and to “support the business,” a new report from Aberdeen Group makes interesting reading.
The analyst has found that most companies are trying to devise a set of incentives for employees, founded on metrics, to help improve their levels of customer service. Aberdeen cites Sears and Time Warner Cable as working on this.
Aberdeen continues, though, that many companies are actually falling short in their goal, and struggling to manage service performance.
Aberdeen’s findings are important to those in application development because IT is increasingly being regarded as something that must also deliver good customer service. IT has a tougher time than someone in sales or in a call center though, because it invariably serves two types of customers, rather than just one. IT’s customers can be end users inside the employer company (where the IT shop acts as the service provider) and users of the employer’s products. People like Sears and Time Warner are invariably focused on just serving external customers, with retail products or cable bundles and services.
We at 6th Sense Analytics are in the business of real-time analytical metrics - in other words, we deliver the metrics organizations will use to measure performance of IT in dealing with internal and external consumers of our work. Metrics, though, are just one half of this story when it comes to measuring performance. Once you have the data, the question then becomes: what do I do with these metrics - and that’s where companies are struggling.
While Aberdeen is not talking about our own area specifically, the analyst does make some recommendations that people working with metrics should bear in mind when sifting data and devising those performance benchmarks. Here are four good points:
Pick the right key performance indicators
Align individual stakeholder goals with the organization- and corporate-wide goals
Lay a solid and predictable foundation with the service contract
(Importantly) don’t lose sight of the customer experience.
Things have been heating up in metrics. Recently, both Hewlett Packard and IBM announced separate plans to purchase companies that will give their customers greater power to manage IT assets. Of particular interest was HP's plan to buy Mercury Interactive for $4.5bn. That's HP's biggest deal since it bought Compaq, and it signals big systems companies are getting serious about giving their customers the ability to manage applications at a fine-grained level. HP should be expected to integrate Mercury with tools and interfaces in its OpenView suite.
Mercury's bread and butter is gathering and analyzing data from applications, which IT teams use to tune the performance of those applications. While HP is moving in the right direction in terms of visibility and tuning, following IBM and CA, there's an important piece still missing from HP's metrics and asset management puzzle. Indeed, this piece is missing from the stories of IBM and CA.
That piece? People.
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6th Sense is getting some star power. Dr. Philip Johnson, a pioneer in software development metrics and professor of information and computer sciences at the University of Hawaii's Collaborative Software Development Laboratory (phew), is coming aboard the good ship 6th Sense. Dr. Johnson is joining as a member of our advisory board, where he�ll lend his considerable skills and vision to our work in development metrics and also help our community building.
Dr. Johnson (or Philip as he likes to be called) is the principal creator and leader of the Hackystat project. Hackstat is an open, web services based framework that is capable of helping individuals collect metrics in order to gain greater insight into software development projects.
When we first started work on 6th Sense we conducted a thorough search of software development measurement and metrics, and quickly came to the conclusion Hackystat is the best there is. We immediately contacted Philip with a view to establishing a major, on-going relationship with him and his CSDL team.
Why? Well, we share a common and powerful vision that empirical software development can help bring in projects on time and on budget by giving teams the resources they need early on. By joining forces and working together we believe we can realize this vision quicker than if we worked separately in silos.
The Hackystat framework serves as the core technology for our sensors, which are already helping technology teams collate development metrics for people to keep their software projects running smoothly. In addition to contributing on going patches and bug fixes we will also contribute our sensors back to the community, to maintain openness and visibility. So far, we've already released sensors for Subversion and Bugzilla among other leading tools. Lastly, we are also contributing $25K to the CSDL for added support.
We're looking forward to a long, fruitful and - needless to say - enjoyable relationship with Philip, his team and the community in delivering on our shared vision of closing the knowledge gap between metrics and software development.
