Stories in Pivotal Tracker have been given a serious upgrade. For the most part it’s all pretty self explanatory - the functionality you’re used to is all there, just in a format that’s more intuitive, user friendly and hopefully you’ll agree, more appealing. Our advice, play with it and then come back and read the rest of this post, especially if anything is confusing.

You’re back, so let’s continue!

One of the goals of Tracker has always been to make collaboration around your story backlog as easy as possible, so that your team spends less time managing your project and more of it actually building things. We think there’s room to make that not just easier, but more enjoyable, even fun! So to that end, great usability and user experience are major themes in our backlog for 2012, starting with this story redesign.

See below for all the highlights.

New Look and Feel

Like we said, stories look different, and are hopefully a lot easier to work with now. It's a complete redesign, with a color scheme that fits better with the rest of the Tracker UI, and that's intended to make the important information in a story stand out more - such as the story title, description, comments, code commits, and file attachments.

Besides visual appeal, we’re aiming to reduce clicks - for example, when creating a new story, it only takes one click to choose a story type or point estimate value. And, you can now start, finish, deliver, or accept/reject an expanded story with one click, with the familiar buttons.

Click to Copy ID and Story URL

We heard your feedback about having to scroll down in stories to find their IDs, to copy them to your commit messages (you are using the source commit integration, right?). So, we've moved the ID to the top of stories, and made it so that you can copy the ID to the clipboard with one click (on the ID button).

The same is true for the story URL, for when you need to send someone a link to the story. Just click the link button in the top left corner, and the story's full URL will be copied to the clipboard. Note - you’ll need Flash enabled in your browser for these to work. If you don’t have Flash, you’ll see the full URL on a separate line, so you can copy it the old way.

Less commonly used actions, including delete and view history, have been moved to the “More” menu, which is where we’ll be adding some other convenience actions soon.

File Attachments on Comments

One big change in this redesign is that files are now attached to stories as part of posting a comment, rather than as a separate list. This is because files are commonly uploaded and shared in the context of an on-going conversation, and it’s so much easier to refer to a file that’s actually part of that comment (e.g. “Here’s that icon”) rather than having to say “see the file named foo.gif at the bottom of the story”.

You can still drag and drop files from your desktop to stories, and entering an actual comment when adding files is optional - just drop your files on a story and close it.

View All Images and Comment Filtering

The truth is, thumbnails of mockups attached to a story can be indistinguishable from one another. Sometimes you just need to see them all full sized, on one page. Now, with just one click of the View All Images link above the Activity section, you can.

We’ve also made it easier to find what you need in a long-winded (all of it beautifully clear and vital) comment conversation - just use the filter dropdown menu at the top right of the Activity section to show just file attachments, just source commits, or all comments without commits.

Feedback

This redesign of stories is the first step in an on-going usability overhaul. We’ve got much more coming over the course of this year, but we’d like to incorporate your feedback at every step, so please let us know what you think so far, in the comments here or by email to tracker@pivotallabs.com.

We are excited to announce a new addition to the services Galorath has to offer.  Dan Galorath (CEO and President of Galorath Incorporated) and Don Reifer (President of Reifer Consultants) have combined their collective seventy years of software development experience to offer:

Independent Risk Assessments

Risk Assessment Teams provide expert-level independent assessment services to determine root-causes of problems and recovery when faced with adversity at the enterprise, program or project level.  Dan Galorath and Don Reifer , along with the rest of the Galorath senior staff bring their extensive experience in a wide range of technical, management and costing specialties to remove subjectivity by using numbers in order to justify the needed change.  This proven methodology uncovers both risks and remedies using a variety of approaches to yield results in even the most troubled organizations and projects.

The Galorath/Reifer Risk Assessment independently determines risk in a structured and systematic manner.  Using purpose built checklists, they interact with the stakeholders to gather the facts to reveal the true issues, not the perceived issues.  Subsequent root cause analysis uses available metrics and performance data to isolate and quantify the issues from which they develop a custom action plan to fix the causes of the problem, not the symptoms.  Using this approach, they have been able steer troubled organizations and projects back on track.  Results from the Independent Risk Assessments have yielded millions in award fees, contract renewals and extensions.

Areas of Expertise

• Enterprise Management
• Systems Engineering and Architecture
• Hardware and Software Engineering
• Independent Cost and Schedule Estimation
• Metrics and Measurement
• Root Cause Discovery and Analysis

Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

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I don’t know how this year’s Super Bowl will turn out, but being from New England I’m naturally rooting for the Patriots. And I’ll admit that the New York Giants certainly give me reason to worry… However, it should be a great game!

This will be Tom Brady’s fifth Super Bowl appearance, an indicator that he’s been playing at an elite level for quite some time now. What does it take to be one of the best? Apart from his incredible work ethic and constant study of the game, Tom Brady focuses on a superb execution of the basics.

In his article Tom Brady still listens to QB whisperer, Tim Graham talks about how Brady recognizes the need for solid mechanics and works on them constantly. Interestingly enough, Brady still relies on Tom Martinez, his personal throwing coach since before he ever made his first junior varsity start.

Why? According to Martinez, a coach discussing flaws with someone of Brady’s caliber can be intimidating to the coach because the coach isn’t as good as the player. “So they hesitate to say things,” Martinez says. “Therefore, the player gets sloppy.”

Coaches shouldn’t be afraid! It’s up to coaches and leaders to make sure that people and teams haven’t strayed away from the fundamentals before we start making a bunch of other “fixes.” And bear in mind that those who are being coached might be experts at what they do, but often lack the perspective on what is going wrong with their own performance.

This was pointed out in the book, Unusually Excellent by John Hamm. Hamm observed that some of the greatest golfers on the planet went to coaches to correct problems with their game, and he noticed that the golfers had some very strong opinions about what they felt was wrong. And what did the coaches do? The coaches “…politely and deceptively ignored that line of thought and instead insisted that the golfer begin with the most basic fundamentals of grip, stance, posture, ball position and aim.”

Why? Because, Hamm explains, “Even the best performers, in any field, will slowly—and imperceptibly—stray away from the fundamentals of their craft. This drift is almost always invisible to them. The human nature part is that losing precision in the fundamentals is exactly the last thing most accomplished people would imagine or will accept as the cause.”

Agile teams can drift in the same ways. Putting too much work in progress at one time can cause teams to finish sprints with little in the done column. Or they stop tasking User Stories out or skimp on the basics in some other way. They drift from the fundamentals – and run into problems.

If you’re a coach or ScrumMaster, keep an eye out on the basics and gently guide your team back to those basics if you see that they are running into trouble. It can be very rewarding, just like John Hamm’s golf coaching story concludes: “I can't tell you how many times I've watched these professional golfers, after an hour of a supervised, disciplined return to the basics, begin to hit the ball as well as they ever have, and predictably turn to their coach and say, ‘That was it. You're a genius.’”

Be a coaching genius and keep your team focused on the fundamentals!

We've got a major update of Pivotal Tracker planned for this weekend, which requires downtime while we run a fairly major database schema migration.

The update is planned for Saturday, Feb. 4, at 9:00 Pacific Standard Time (PST), or 17:00 UTC, and we expect it to take approximately one hour.

Apologies for the inconvenience, but we're hopeful that you'll like what we're rolling out!

For real time status updates, please follow @pivotaltracker on Twitter.

We have a great webinar coming up, titled: Transforming development visibility and productivity with Borland StarTeam 12.0 and Tasktop. In this webinar, Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop, and Stuart McGill, Borland General Manager, will show you how StarTeam customers benefit from Borland’s strategic partnership with Tasktop, and the increased visibility that Tasktop Sync delivers by integrating StarTeam with your other ALM tools.

The new StarTeam 12 is comes with full Tasktop Dev and Sync support. Together with Tasktop, it includes a host of new features designed to benefit both developers and management. Now it is easier than ever to extend the interoperability and co-existence between ALM tools and asset types across software development teams, while management benefit from improved insight into delivery goals and their predictability.

In this webinar you will discover the benefits of our new collaboration, and:

Discover how StarTeam customers benefit from Borland’s strategic partnership with Tasktop Learn how Tasktop Sync delivers visibility by integrating StarTeam with your other ALM tools See how developers get the most modern and integrated experience for StarTeam with Tasktop Dev

When: Tues, Feb 7th, 2012: 8 am PST, 11am EST Presented by: Mik Kersten, Tastkop CEO Stuart McGill, Borland General Manager Register now: Webinar – Borland & Tasktop

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I am one of those people who needs to have music on all the time. Every day deserves its own soundtrack, right? Maybe you enjoy listening to classical music on your commute to work, or you prefer rocking out to 80s hair metal while finishing up those spreadsheets at your desk. Even the most mundane things can be improved with the right background music. 

That’s why I've come up with the Ultimate Project Manager Playlist. How did these songs make the cut? I had strict criteria for each song: 

• How hard does it rock? The scale went from 1 (“elevator music”) to 11 (“melts faces”). 
• Whether this was demonstrated in the song title or in the content of the lyrics, the song had to have something to do with the project management profession.
• The song is just really fun/hilarious/great to dance to. The work day can already feel much longer than eight hours; what's the harm in listening to a little Jimmy Buffett to spice things up?

Your suggestions on Twitter and Facebook were also a huge help - keep them coming! So without further ado, let's get this party started:

1. Michael Jackson – Working Day and Night

2. Bachman Turner Overdrive - Taking Care of Business

3. Blue Oyster Cult – Deadline

4. Survivor - Eye of the Tiger

5. The Beatles – Help!

6. Billy Joel – She’s Right On Time

7. Alan Jackson and Jimmy Buffett - It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

8. Puff Daddy – It’s All About the Benjamins

9. Europe – The Final Countdown

10. Blink 182 – All The Small Things

How did I do? Did I miss anything obvious? Leave a comment and let me know!

As long as you are the best.

For example, MySpace was first to market, generating an incredible following and was by all standards a huge success – THE player in what we now know and love as social media. MySpace was purchased by News Corporation and had all the advantages of professional management and financial backing to guide and fuel its continued growth. In effect, the social media market was MySpace’s to lose. And lose it did. To a company called Facebook launched by some college undergrads.

Why? Because while MySpace was an innovator, it wasn’t a leader. MySpace captured a sizeable market share by being first with a great idea – validating the existence of a market – but it failed to capitalize on its first-mover advantage. Instead, Facebook took the lead in truly learning about what customers wanted and adapting its offering, eventually taking the lead in market share.

Adam Hartung’s interesting Forbes article, How Facebook Beat Myspace, characterizes MySpace’s downfall as demonstrating the “…big fallacy of modern management. The belief that smart MBAs, with industry knowledge, will perform better. That ‘good management’ means you predict, you forecast, you plan, and then you go execute the plan.”

The danger in this, Hartung says, is that professional managers feel that you “…should be able to predict and perform without making mistakes. That once the bright folks who create the strategy set a direction, it’s all about executing the plan. That execution will lead to success. If you stumble, you need to focus harder on execution.”

In effect, MySpace lost its leadership through traditional management practices. Better execution on MySpace’s part using their current management/business practices would not have helped against Facebook. That’s because Facebook wasn’t attempting to predict the future with a “plan the work and work the plan” mindset. Far from it. As Hartung points out:
“...the brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg was his willingness to allow Facebook to go wherever the market wanted it. Farmville and other social games -- why not? Different ways to find potential friends -- go for it. The founders kept pushing the technology to do anything users wanted. If you have an idea for networking on something, Facebook pushed its tech folks to make it happen. And they kept listening. And looking within the comments for what would be the next application -- the next promotion -- the next revision that would lead to more uses, more users and more growth.” Hartung attributes Facebook’s success to what he calls White Space management, where you don’t forecast and plan, but get to market and learn. Facebook continually tested ideas and listened to its customers. This same approach is advocated by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen in Great by Choice and Eric Ries in The Lean Startup.

It’s all about using a low-cost, low-distraction, low-risk, empirical learning process to discover the truth about what works. The goal, Ries says, is to generate feedback and data as quickly as possible to learn what customer likes and dislikes; to understand how many people use a feature and find it valuable.

Another term for this is business agility, where agile and Lean principles are applied to create a learning, responsive and adaptive organization – one that is focused on delighting its customers by providing an intuitive product with easy-to-use features.

MySpace initially reaped the rewards of being an innovator, but lost in the long term because Facebook took the lead in learning and adapting its offering by being closer to the customer. While most business advice tells you not to compete with an established competitor, Facebook clearly had a hidden advantage in how they conducted business. Agility has its rewards!

We love hearing from our customers and receiving product feedback. It not only allows us to improve our online project management tool, but we also get to learn from our customers. Sometimes THEY'RE the ones teaching us a scheduling trick or two! 

I recently had a call with one of our longtime customers, Matt Nisonger. Matt is with SharedVue, an ever-growing cloud marketing company, and he's definitely earned the title of "LP Guru." Want proof of his LiquidPlanner prowess? Matt formulated his own project creation workflow trick that's so good, we just had to share it.

With SharedVue’s steady influx of projects, Matt needed to find a way to streamline project creation. As he explains it, “we wanted to find a way for our Project Managers to quickly set up projects without having to recreate the wheel each time with regard to scoping out tasks and phases." In short, his goals were to create a template that could: 

• Be used for the planning of all projects;
• Place the responsibility for scoping and task planning on departmental leads;
• Free the project manager from having to track detailed tasks outside of their domain.

Here’s how Matt’s project creation process works: 

1. He's started by creating a general “skeleton” template for his projects:

Note that the milestones are determined by client deadlines, are driven by department work, and the project manager is responsible for making sure each one is met. The grey sub-folders are for functional breakdowns that represent each department that typically works on the project. They are assigned to the departmental heads and will be populated with tasks as soon as they are scoped by the department.

2. When the “Project Approved” milestone is met, the project manager duplicates this template and keeps the new, "live" project low in the priority order until it is fully built out. To initiate the project work, the project manager uses our Email Integration feature to send comments directly to departmental heads requesting that they initiate scoping for the project. 

3. The department heads then create task deliverables within their allocated sub-folder, estimate them, and assign them to their team members. They have one week to scope their portion of the project. This locks down the scoping period, ensures that everyone involved has early input, and helps prevent future feature creep. Once this is complete, the project manager checks off the “Scoping” milestone for each department. 

4. Next, the “Scheduling Signoff” milestone is the kick-off to bring the project up in priority order and start prioritizing project tasks within the monthly package structure they have in place. See below:

The project manager and department heads have a 15 minute huddle each week (with LiquidPlanner up on a projector) to prioritize tasks within packages and discuss status updates and resource allocation.

5. Once each department has executed all tasks within their sub-folders, the PM signs off on all the work by marking the “Signoff” milestones complete. This process allows the project manager to focus primarily on managing the scoping process and tracking against major milestones. They can check on status by simply viewing how many hours have rolled up in the "Total Done" column for each of the the departmental sub- folders.

6. Finally, the last milestone for “Push to Production” is used to mark the date when the product is released and available to the customer.

Although this exact project creation workflow is specific to Matt and his team, you might be able to apply some of his ideas to your own project creation and prioritization needs.

Do you have any tricks you’d like to share with fellow LP customers for more efficient project planning? If so, I’d love to hear them! Feel free to shoot me an email at jen@liquidplanner.com or leave a comment below.

In my recent post Charting a Course for Corporate Success, I outlined three, broad categories of innovation:

• Disruptive, Breakthrough Innovations.
• Sustaining, High-Value Change.
• Everyday Creativity and Emergent Innovation.

When it comes to leading businesses, it is important that we don’t just come up with new things; we need to innovate in ways that create value for our customers. As research by Robert Wolcott and Mohanbir Sawhney demonstrates, there are many different ways that business can innovate to achieve this outcome. They came up with twelve dimensions of innovation that we can consider:

Offerings: These are new products and services that are valued by the customer, like the iPhone.

Platform: A platform is a set of common components, assembly methods, or technologies that are building blocks that can be leveraged with a portfolio of products or services, allowing you to create a set of derivative offerings faster and easier than building them all from scratch.

Solutions: This involves creating a customized, integrated combination of products, services, and information to solve a customer’s problem. This can be an end-to-end solution that simplifies and reduces the logistics of something like procurement and delivery, for example.

Customers: The identification of new customer segments or unmet needs.

Customer Experience: This involves any and all things that a customer feels, hears, sees, and experiences in dealing with your company.

Value Capture: Innovation that discovers untapped revenue streams or expands the ability to capture value from interactions with customers.

Process: This type of innovation concentrates on the internal business activities and improving the efficiency of those processes.

Organization: This is a redesign of organizational structure and a company’s activities, possibly redesigning roles, responsibilities, and incentives of different business units and individuals.

Supply Chain: This involves re-sequencing activities and agents in the sourcing and delivery of goods and services.

Presence: This type of innovation focuses on the creation of new distribution channels or new ways of leveraging existing channels.

Networking: Innovation that concentrates on how products and services are connected to customers and how to improve and use those connections to create competitive advantage.

Brand: Brands communicates a promise to customers, and innovation in this realm involves extending the brand in some way.

I get a lot of questions about how to use LiquidPlanner for (or in addition to) bug tracking software.  We have LiquidPlanner customers doing both, depending on the nature of their team, the systems that are already in place, etc. Several customers are using our API to integrate with GitHub, Jira, and Bugzilla. Internally, we use LiquidPlanner and only LiquidPlanner for filing, tracking, collaborating on, and verifying bugs & incidents.

Why? At the end of the day, we want to track bugs along with the rest of our work—in our schedule. Bugs need to be assigned, estimated, and prioritized alongside our project work, based on their severity and impact. We fix bugs (new and existing) in every release of LiquidPlanner, and since LiquidPlanner is the one system we all look at every day, it doesn’t make sense for us to track them in a separate system.

But how, you might ask, does it actually work? Here are the gory details.

First, we have a single place to collect new bugs.  They all get sent to a Package called “UNTRIAGED,” which is the central holding place for new bugs, feature requests, ideas, and tasks until we can process them (Figure 1).  This Package has a relatively high priority position in the "Projects" page of LiquidPlanner, just under our urgent work and active sprint releases.

For us, bugs come to our attention in a variety of ways. They might be reported by a customer via email, found during the testing process or through our normal use of the tool, or sent to us as a system alert.

To get these items into LiquidPlanner, most of us use email integration. This “UNTRIAGED” Package has its own email address, which we’ve all added to our address books. When we mail an issue into LiquidPlanner, we automatically create a new “task” for tracking.

Using the subject line of the email, we can:

• Name the bug (usually it starts with “Bug: XXXXX”)
• Assign the bug to any member of our workspace
• Estimate it in any unit we want (2-4h, .5-1d)

The attached documents and body of the email (including screenshots, repro steps, or error messaging) get saved to the Details page of LiquidPlanner, ensuring that all relevant information stays with the item as it goes through our workflow.

Next, we have twice-weekly meetings to process our “UNTRIAGED” bugs. During those meetings, we review every new item, and assign, estimate, and prioritize it. Some bugs get moved into the current sprint, others get pushed into the staging sprint or out to the backlog. If a new bug is assigned to a developer, they get notified via email and it shows up on their personal tasklist.

We typically structure the work in each release into several major categories, one of which is “Bugs.” This allows us to view, analyze, and report on them as a group, separate from other tasks like new features or tech debt. However, as you can see in Figure 2, the amount of work associated with bugs is non-trivial – hence our interest in tracking them in conjunction with our other project work!

All comments, collaboration, updates, and files associated with the bugs are stored on the Details Page. This includes references to specific customers who may have been affected.  Sometimes this information can pile up, but since the most recent comments, documents, and links are added to the top of the list, it’s pretty easy to stay on top of the latest happenings for each item. We also have LiquidPlanner integrated with our source control system, so that applicable references/commit notifications are automatically added as comments to the bug.

Finally, once the bug has been fixed, we assign it back to the creator (or a tester) for verification. By simply switching ownership of the task, we can move it through an informal workflow that doesn’t bog us down in process. (The person who created the item is also notified by email that they have a new assignment.) Once the fix has been verified, the item is marked done and becomes part of our (fully searchable) archive for later reference.  Voilà!

We recently added new custom fields that allow us to track our bugs even more effectively. We've created a custom field for "bugs", "feature requests", etc. And, when a new issue comes up, we simply assign the appropriate custom field. This is great for filtering in the plan and for reporting purposes!

Naturally, you can argue that LiquidPlanner lacks some of the features of a dedicated bug management system. I’ll give you that. But what it lacks in dedicated features it makes up for in ease of use, simplicity, and integration into our other processes.

I’ve long been an admirer of Tasktop, for a number of reasons: First, as Eclipse users already know, Tasktop has built some really cool Eclipse technology, including the Mylyn task-focused interface. But many companies have built cool open source tools. It’s much harder to take those tools and build a growing, dynamic company around them. But plenty of companies have also done that, usually by following the standard open source business model: package services and a bit of value-add around a captive open-source offering, and wait for customers. Tasktop takes a far more challenging and rewarding approach: It nurtures a healthy open source eco-system around core technologies, but then re-imagines and re-purposes them, leveraging unique products that address real customer pain. That takes real vision, and to me it’s a clear signal that the Tasktop leadership is able to imagine and execute at an entirely different energy level.

So rather than admire Tasktop from a distance, I joined it! I first worked with Tasktop last year as a consultant developing the initial implementation of what has become the Mylyn Model Focusing Tools project. That was a great opportunity to get to know some of the team and the Tasktop way. Everything I saw then fit nicely with what I’d already intuited. We have a really great combination of engineering excellence, creativity and lightweight organization.

It’s nice to say “we” again — I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed having colleagues to work together with on challenging problems. The morning I joined Tasktop, I saw a stream of emails from everyone welcoming me to the team. I must admit to some cynicism about the whole “team” thing — like so much else, it can be an empty word that doesn’t match up to reality — but in this case it feels very genuine. So heartfelt thanks to everyone.

It’s an exciting time to be building software tools. It might sound funny, but I like to think of software development as a helping profession. That’s because I think that software products really can help people live more fulfilling, interesting and even happy lives. When I tell my family and non-techie friends that I’m working on Automated Lifecycle Management (ALM) tools I get a blank look. So instead I remind them that almost everything we do relies on software and that software programs are by far the the most complex artifact that humans have ever created. And I tell them that software development communities are growing ever more diverse, distributed, interwoven and complex. So what do we do at Tasktop? We build software that embraces those complexities.

Tasktop Dev tackles the issue of software complexity. It handles a lot of the repetitive and boring stuff, simplifies and clarifies everything else, and is deeply and imaginatively integrated with other development tools. Tasktop Sync and Code2Cloud — along with other exciting tools that we’re working on — tackle the even more challenging issue of community complexity. Even a relatively small software product might involve code developed by a rich community spanning companies, technologies, continents, and even (think about the Open-Source movement) different economic models and incentive systems. And in larger projects thousands of developers might be collaborating across all of these dimensions. Software development efforts are intimately connected with customers, management, marketing, support, regulators and every other imaginable kind of stakeholder. All of these people need to talk to one another, and it seems that everyone uses different tools to manage the unique aspects of their tasks or work environments. Tasktop builds software that helps those tools to work together so that everyone can focus together on the stuff that matters. In short, we break down boundaries and help people communicate. That’s worth doing.

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The essential, underlying aspect of your company’s strategy is its distinctive competence and the perceived value of this competence by your customers. You need to articulate your purpose, and this requires a strong focus.

A great example of exquisite focus is found in the book, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy by Richard Rumelt. While I personally lack experience in manufacturing, I can certainly appreciate the example of Crown Cork & Seal and its brilliant strategy crafted by John F. Connelly in the 1960s.

Back in the day, Crown Cork and Seal was a smaller manufacturer specializing in containers for “hard-to-hold products” like aerosols and carbonated drinks. The industry was dominated by three major competitors: Continental Can, National Can, and American Can.

It was a standard industry practice of most beverage companies to maintain at least two sources of can supply, and there was always the threat that a beverage company could purchase a can line and manufacture its own cans. In response to this, the “big three” can makers often set up plants close to a customer. Thus, the big can makers became willing, captive producers in order to benefit from long production runs (because there was a large cost involved with changing lines to make one can type versus another).

The net result were low profit rates of 4 to 5 percent return on assets by the major can companies. Despite being a smaller player in a difficult industry with low returns for major players, Crown Cork & Seal managed to be fifty to sixty percent more profitable than the big three.

How did they do it? Richard Rumelt posed this question to his executive MBA Class on strategy identification. And that meant digging and thinking deeply about the situation, looking for answers beyond information that was readily at hand.

Conventional wisdom was that Crown specialized in containers for hard-to-hold products such as aerosols and carbonated drinks, but that alone does not explain Crown’s success. Someone suggested that Crown must be the low-cost producer, since putting soda into a can is not a big technical feat and that Crown wasn’t the only company able to do this. And is it turned out, Crown’s unit cost per can was actually higher, not lower, than its competitors’.

“You can’t differentiate a can.” So how did Crown profitably differentiate itself?

Rumelt steered the class towards the real answer by drawing their attention on Crown’s policies and positioning to determine its true focus. The first two policies examined were those of providing technical assistance and rapid response.

The critical observations were that large companies don’t need technical assistance, and in fact are more likely able to give it. It is the small companies need assistance. Likewise, smaller companies also have less stable demand.

Related to demand instability, companies can also produce seasonal products or introduce new products that could lead to unpredictable demand spikes. A hotter than anticipated summer with a new beer product, for example, could create a situation for rush orders.

But there was more. Crown also had a manufacturing policy. Crown’s plants were actually smaller than its competitors, and none of the plants were captive. Not only did Crown’s plants service more customers per plant than their competition, their production of cans per customer was a lot lower.

In effect, Crown’s policies were different from the industry norm. Going for the “long runs” made the majors captive, but Crown chose to play by different rules in the same industry. Crown specialized in soft drink and aerosol cans with shorter runs. The runs may be shorter because the customer is smaller, because the product is newer, or because there is a rush order to cover seasonal or unexpected demand.

By specializing on a carefully selected part of the market, Crown increased its bargaining power with respect to its buyers and generated a greater return. Crown crafted a competitive, profitable advantage for itself in a very tough industry.

I don’t do justice to the Crown story in this post -- you really should read the book for a more complete walkthrough of strategy identification (and more). I found Good Strategy/Bad Strategy to be an excellent book on business strategy.

I had the pleasure of meeting and working with Bob Lewis of Infoworld and CIO magazines recently.  In looking through his many excellent blogs I noticed this one today. It sumarizes a viable metrics program very well and is compatible with the goal, question, metric approach.  He calls it the 6 C's of effective metrics:

1. "Connected to Organizational Goals: Good metrics are connected to important goals. In fact, they begin as important goals, stated in English.
2. Consistent: Consistent metrics always go in one direction when the situation improves and the other direction when it deteriorates. If good doesn't always point in one direction and bad in the other, your metric will drive organizational dysfunction.
3. Calibrated: Calibration means you get the same value in the same situation no matter who records it. It also means the data are free from sample bias and other quality problems.
4. Complete: Anything you don't measure you don't get, so any useful system of measures must include all factors that are important to achieving the goal.
5. Communicated: The purpose of metrics is to drive behavior. If you don't communicate their purpose, they won't drive behavior.
6. Current: Goals change. Keep the old measures and you'll achieve your old goals, not your new ones."

 

Thank you for reading "Dan on Estimating", if you would like more information about Galorath's estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

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At a time when corporate survival rates are declining, what do companies – and leaders in particular – need to do to chart a course when maps aren’t readily available? You can’t “cut your way to glory” – at some point businesses need to innovate and grow. But how do you evaluate what the right direction is for your company? Where should you focus?

This is a difficult challenge, and unfortunately, there isn’t a step-by-step cookbook available to solve this problem. I’ve culled together advice from several sources to aid in charting your own course to success. Fair warning: This isn’t a process, just a framework for thinking that provides a little orientation. I’ll admit that is a lot easier pulling this information together than applying it; the hard part is involves thinking deeply about your own situation.

Prerequistes
Profitability as a Goal is Assumed: The business exists to be profitable. There is no need to state the obvious with a “directional” statement like, “We need to maximize shareholder value.” What information or guidance does this provide to anyone in the organization? The key objective is to determine (specifically) what to do and how to it profitably.

A Customer-Centric View is the Overarching Theme: In order for companies to succeed, they must convince customers to part with their hard-earned money in exchange for something you offer as value. Customers should be delighted in what you offer and in their experiences your company. Your value should be unique – distinctive competence is an oft-used term – and protectable in some way. Furthermore, you must be able to communicate your value proposition clearly to all concerned, from potential customers to your employees.

What is Your Purpose?
Three Key Questions that Help Define and Clarify Your Purpose: In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins discusses what he calls the Hedgehog Concept, which focuses on a single, unifying concept that provides a clarifying advantage, your core competency. Answering three key questions surfaces this clarifying advantage:

• What can we be the best in the world at? This is not simply an intention or a goal to be the best, but driven through an understanding of what you can be the best at.
• What drives our economic engine? Even in a commoditized industry, it is still possible to be profitable, but this requires deep insight into the economics and opportunities available.
• What are we deeply passionate about? Do the things that make you and those around you passionate. In a fantastic TED talk (included in my post, People Don't Buy What You Do...), Simon Sinek argues the companies should transcend simply “filling a need” to being companies who truly believe in something and “…do business with people who believe what you believe.”

Choose Between One of Three Dimensions of Excellence: In the spirit of not being all things to all people, The Discipline of Market Leaders advises us to choose one of three dimensions to excel at:

• Operational Excellence. An operationally excellent organization delivers a combination of price, quality and ease of purchase to its customers. Companies that excel in this dimension are well organized, valuing stability and predictability that are captured in efficient and effective processes. These organizations tend to be risk-adverse in comparison to product leadership organizations.
• Product Leadership. Product Leadership organizations deliver the best product or services to its customers, period. Companies that excel in this dimension are willing to push the envelope, to explore the boundaries into the realm of the unknown to deliver the best product or service. These organizations don’t just identify the current needs of the market; they look to the future needs of the market and work like crazy to get there first. Product leadership organizations are striving to meet needs that customers do not realize that they have.
• Customer Intimacy. Organizations that are intimate with their customers understand the needs of each and every customer and provide the best total solution for each specific customer. These organizations build bonds with their customers and are not viewed as simply a “vendor,” but as a trusted advisor by their customers. These organizations remain flexible and responsive to changing customer needs, seeking to build a long-term relationship with their customers.

Choosing one does not mean disregarding the other value disciplines. Companies must choose to excel at a specific dimension, but maintain threshold standards in the other dimensions.

Choose the Right Category of Innovation: Innovation plays an important role in defining your distinctive competence and corporate growth. As the The Innovator's Solution and Disciplined Dreaming point out, one size doesn’t fit all, and the same is true for innovation. Both books categorize innovation (The Innovator’s Solution mentions two categories and Disciplined Dreaming mentions three), so consider where you need to innovate in context with the dimension you’ve chosen to excel in and your current circumstances:

• Disruptive, Breakthrough Innovations. This is the most popularized form of innovation – the game-changing innovations that rewrite the rules of the game. Ford’s assembly line and the iPhone are examples. Everything doesn’t have to be about breakthrough innovations, however.
• Sustaining, High-Value Change. Innovations in this category focus on making existing products or services better. Adding new, compelling features to existing products, providing add-on products to existing products, or improving the efficiency of existing processes are examples.
• Everyday Creativity and Emergent Innovation. People can make small changes in the routine, everyday work that can ultimately add up to big results. I used the term emergent innovation in an article on the advantages of agile development to capture how the collaborative nature of agile development created the opportunity for small-scale innovations to occur. Examples include improving a customer experience on a service call or making a small adjustment to make a product feature a little simpler and easier to use.

Assess and Iterate. It takes a lot of time and effort to achieve a deep understanding of your industry and how your business can profitably approach that industry. As you consider your options, make sure that it is not too complicated or that the result does not become watered down as you socialize it within your organization. Your purpose should be clear, compelling and distinctive. If it isn’t, circle back and keep trying!

How Are You Going to Get There?
Define Your Strategy. Once you’ve decided what your company is all about, you need to determine how it will get there. There is overlap in what I've previously covered because strategic thinking is also involved in setting direction. For example, it’s not a good idea to compete head-to-head with an established incumbent. You need an advantage.

The book Product Strategy for High Technology Companies provides three questions that must be asked in order to have a complete, Core Strategic Vision (CSV):

• Where do we want to go?
• How will we get there?
• Why will we be successful?

A key to a good CSV is that is aggressive and mostly likely a stretch to accomplish, but it shouldn't be impossible or unrealistic.

An essential point is that goals do not equal strategy. “20 percent growth” is a goal – an ambition for a desired target condition – but not a strategy. Good strategies must define how an organization will proceed, and in the process it should be easy to rule out a variety of other alternative actions because they aren’t applicable to the stated strategy. In the spirit of the book Switch, leaders must script the critical moves.

As Good Strategy Bad Strategy tells us, strategy should be coherent. “…the resource deployments, policies, and maneuvers that are undertaken should be consistent and coordinated. The coordination of action provides the most basic source of leverage or advantage available in strategy.”

One final quote from Good Strategy Bad Strategy puts this all together: “Good strategy is not just ‘what’ you are trying to do. It is also ‘why’ and ‘how’ you are doing it.”

What About Vision Statements and Mission Statements?
I didn’t lead with these, but once you’ve considered what your company is all about – its direction, beliefs and values – and how it will get there, producing both mission and vision statements should be a simple exercise. (It’s the thinking that’s hard!)

The basic definitions of vision and mission statements vary, but mine are as follows:

A vision statement defines an organization’s purpose, but does so by incorporating Simon Sinek’s notion of the organization’s belief, articulating the organization’s values versus measures. A vision statement contains more emotional content than a mission statement and is a longer-term view that describes how an organization contributes to the world.

A mission statement is designed to be internally-facing, defining an organization’s purpose and primary objectives along with key measures.

For some additional information and examples, see my post, Are People Buying What You’re Selling?

Ah, holiday. Vacation. Time spent not working. No matter how you say it, the concept of getting away from the office and instead, taking tightrope walking classes in Paris, for example, is incredibly exciting. Or maybe your idea of a perfect vacation is to spend 48 hours straight in your living room catching up on Downton Abbey. There’s no judgment here.

However, before you pack up and head off for distant, unknown lands, there’s one thing you need to remember to do: tell LiquidPlanner about your upcoming absence. Why? LiquidPlanner is constantly trying to predict and build the most accurate schedule it can for you and your team.

So if you’re not available to work at some point, LiquidPlanner needs to know so that it doesn’t schedule you for work during those dates. You wouldn’t want LiquidPlanner to think you’re working on those website specs when you’re actually perfecting cannonballs while cliff diving in Fiji, right? To tell LiquidPlanner about your holiday, you’ll need to create an event. Many teams like to do this by creating a package called “Events,” and then having each team member put their own personal events in that same package. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the Add button at the top of your Projects page. Click “Package.”
2. An edit pane will pop up. Call the package “Events.”
3. After it’s added to your project plan, the Events package may drop to the bottom of your page. For ease of reference, drag and drop that package to the top.

Now on to adding the event itself. You say you’re climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in June? Sounds a little insane, but good for you! To add this event or so called “vacation” (did I mention I think you’re nuts?) to your new Events package:

1. Go back to the Add button and select “Add an Event.”
2. The edit pane will pop up. Rename the event something like “Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Someone Please Talk Me Out of This.”  
3. Double-check that the event is assigned to you.
4. Enter the calendar dates in which you’ll be gone. This is one of the only times that LiquidPlanner will ask you for hard dates. 
5. Hit save. 

LiquidPlanner will automatically recalculate your project plan, flowing work around your holiday. You’ll know instantly if your little jaunt will cause any project deadlines to become at risk, and you can go put out those fires before the big day comes.

Feeling a little foggy about this process still? Our Support Manager Mary Ellen can give you a visual tour step-by-step in our new training video, “Planning Events": 

And no matter where your travels take you: Bon voyage!

Ah, holiday. Vacation. Time spent not working. No matter how you say it, the concept of getting away from the office and instead, taking tightrope walking classes in Paris, for example, is incredibly exciting. Or maybe your idea of a perfect vacation is to spend 48 hours straight in your living room catching up on Downton Abbey. There’s no judgment here.

However, before you pack up and head off for distant, unknown lands, there’s one thing you need to remember to do: tell LiquidPlanner about your upcoming absence. Why? LiquidPlanner is constantly trying to predict and build the most accurate schedule it can for you and your team.

So if you’re not available to work at some point, LiquidPlanner needs to know so that it doesn’t schedule you for work during those dates. You wouldn’t want LiquidPlanner to think you’re working on those website specs when you’re actually perfecting cannonballs while cliff diving in Fiji, right? To tell LiquidPlanner about your holiday, you’ll need to create an event. Many teams like to do this by creating a package called “Events,” and then having each team member put their own personal events in that same package. Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to the Add button at the top of your Projects page. Click “Package.”
2. An edit pane will pop up. Call the package “Events.”
3. After it’s added to your project plan, the Events package may drop to the bottom of your page. For ease of reference, drag and drop that package to the top.

Now on to adding the event itself. You say you’re climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro in June? Sounds a little insane, but good for you! To add this event or so called “vacation” (did I mention I think you’re nuts?) to your new Events package:

1. Go back to the Add button and select “Add an Event.”
2. The edit pane will pop up. Rename the event something like “Mt. Kilimanjaro” or “Someone Please Talk Me Out of This.”  
3. Double-check that the event is assigned to you.
4. Enter the calendar dates in which you’ll be gone. This is one of the only times that LiquidPlanner will ask you for hard dates. 
5. Hit save. 

LiquidPlanner will automatically recalculate your project plan, flowing work around your holiday. You’ll know instantly if your little jaunt will cause any project deadlines to become at risk, and you can go put out those fires before the big day comes.

Feeling a little foggy about this process still? Our Support Manager Mary Ellen can give you a visual tour step-by-step in our new training video, “Planning Events": 

And no matter where your travels take you: Bon voyage!

Galorath’s Sam Sanchez works extensively with IC’s and with understanding the cost if IC’s. He provided the following:

Over the past year or so, we have been doing FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) material cost research updates in support of our next SEER-IC release and I can’t help being shocked at the recurring costs of some of the higher end FPGAs in the market. Once you pass the simple lower performance items, you start to see a large escalation in the per piece cost.

I remember years ago being surprised to see chips priced at $200 to $800. Now, I regularly see midsized state of the practice chips that go for $10K a piece (and I am not even talking about the leading edge 28nm stuff). At times, I come across several orders of magnitude above this. I guess it’s the sign of the times.

These devices can do more but they do not come cheap. Focusing only on performance, we might say who cares. However, as cost is becoming increasingly more critical, these new technology costs have to be examined closely. If for instance, you are targeting a portable device with a specific recurring cost bogey, you need to carefully consider what these new chip technologies mean not just in development costs but also in recurring costs.  Depending on the size and amount of these FPGAs, their costs that dwarf all other BOM costs.

Thank you for reading “Dan on Estimating”, if you would like more information about Galorath’s estimation models, please visit our contact page or call us at +1 310 414-3222.

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Another technique I’ve been using to increase Agility in our production process is to be less patient with team members when a customer’s need is not met.  This has shifted the focus of the team directly on creating value to the customer. Agile has breathed new life into this classic management principal, from Peter Drucker (perhaps because Agile ties it directly to project management and a production process rather than remaining an overarching corporate philosophy).

Cultural boundaries have become less important using this approach. We operate in a culturally diverse environment. People have different definitions on what it means to put in a good day’s work. By rating performance directly against customer value, people’s perspectives have started to converge and cultural backgrounds matter less.  Problem solving becomes the focus. Each person brings their unique talent to the table. Constraints like cultural norms or a person’s title fade into the background.

Five years ago, on Friday January 15th, I defended my PhD thesis on Focusing Knowledge Work with Task Context. The following Monday, January 17th, we incorporated Tasktop Technologies. Driven by the years of research that it took to prove that tasks are more important than files, integration is more important than features, and that focus begets flow, we embarked on a journey to bring to market a transformation in how we work and collaborate around software.

Our journey and passion have been fueled by our customers and our open source community, as to date we have not taken any external funding, and instead embarked on what’s more recently been defined as the Lean Startup approach to building a company in an Agile and customer-centric fashion. Bootstrapping, we have doubled in revenue and nearly doubled in head count each year since our inception, and now support over a thousand customers and over a million open source users. Working closely with our ISV partners, the Eclipse community and open source ALM projects, we are proud to be one of the key contributors defining the future of ALM.

In addition to the opportunity to be a part of a transformative endeavor, what’s guided our vision is a manic focus on the needs of individual software workers. Mylyn and its commercial counterpart, Tasktop Dev, materialized because the growth in complexity of software and the fragmentation of ALM tools were bringing our and our fellow developers’ productivity to a halt. Tasktop Sync was born out of the same need to give other stakeholders such as testers, project managers and business analysts, a connected and collaborative view on the software delivery process. With our focus on integration, our goal is to empower developers and other stakeholders in order to advance ALM to support the rise of the software-powered economy.

We want to take this birthday moment to thank all of the customers and partners who have made it possible for us to do what we love, which is to invent the future of ALM and to strive for our goal of doubling the productivity of software developers and managers. We hope you like the next round of innovations that we are hard at work for launching in 2012, which will be a definitive year for software, for ALM and for Tasktop Technologies.

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Outsourcing is the business practice where a company uses outside firms to do select projects and special work that might normally be performed within that company. Some examples of what might be outsourced (besides software development) include payroll processing, shipping and distribution, and accounting. You are essentially sending your work to be done by an outside, third party entity. Here are five reasons to consider outsourcing for software product development.

Finding the Right Resources

This is all about bringing in the right combination of talent with the right type of skills when you need them. Many times, companies use outsourcing because it can fill in gaps where they are trying to get something done and they do not have the right resources or the right amount of resources (or the time and money to track them all down). Resources can be people or equipment.

Energy/Leadership Conservation

One reason outsourcing is superior to hiring contract employees is it conserves energy and leadership. When you are outsourcing with a good partner, being a leader should be one less thing that you are worried about. You can devote your energy to other needs. You should not have to manage it – the outsourcing partner provides most of the leadership and energy in managing a project. Not all of it, mind you, but a large chunk. Outsourcing takes the headache of insuring a project gets done and off of a manager’s plate.

Protection of Focus

It is very difficult to be top-of-class in more than one area, and very few can maintain two core competencies. When you are outsourcing, you can outsource to a partner whose core competency is software development. Those companies that try to do too many things really well don’t do anything well. A lot of larger companies can understand this from experience and often startups have to consider outsourcing. Startups can free up their focus by outsourcing non-essential functions. So many companies whose background is not software development are finding themselves deploying software products. It can be much more effective to work with an outsourcing partner than to add another core competency.

Get Unstuck

For many companies, there are a number of projects that are on the books, waiting to be finished or something they want to put in place; however, it seems as though it never gets done. When managers take time to actually sit down and look at the project, it is usually a combination of things that are blocking it from being completed.

Maybe the company does not have the leadership. Perhaps the company does not have the right resources. Or it may be that the project just is not the company’s primary focus. One of the primary benefits of outsourcing is that you can get things done that have been stuck in the queue for a while.

Get Fast

Many companies are used to churning out a project slowly – maybe once a year. This approach doesn’t cut it for the new fast-paced consumer markets developing.

We have found that even when a large organization has a software development capabilty, their teams were not designed to move fast and adapt quickly to change. Bringing in a specialty partner can cut cost and time to market significantly.

We like to encourage companies to consider the complexity, volatility and domain knowledge of a project when deciding whether to do it internally or not. Fast moving, complex and changing projects are often best done with an outsourcing partner.