J. B. Rainsberger has a great blog entry titled Should We Measure Velocity on the importance of knowing where your team spends their time. He says knowing your history is more important than estimating new features.
It’s difficult to know where your development team is headed. Even with a perfect knowledge of how the team members work and how long it takes them to complete a feature, the specification often changes in the middle of a project. I’ve never finished a project with the original set of requirements.
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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.
