I am often asked by potential clients to provide information on how project funds can realistically be allocated across the spectrum of software licenses, services, support and custom design and development.

I think one of the best ways to think about this is to take an example small project and a very large one. So I did this for two recent projects – one a very standard example of a standard Claromentis Intranet product led engagement with a UK company of less than 50 staff, the other a recent deployment in the United States for an unlimited user system with a very significant custom development to provide specific sales related functionality, integration with third party systems and reporting through an Extranet.

Small Project Analysis

What we see with this project is that

• There are only 3 areas of spending – Software, Services and Support
• Software is 75% of the project spend
• Services and Support equally share the remaining 25%

Large Project Analysis

Large Project Financial Analysis

By contrast a large project has significant spending on Development and Design, as well as international travel and general expenses.

• Software licenses are one third of the spend
• Development and design are equal, totaling half of the project

Clearly these are just two examples, but comparing these to our license records for many projects does show that simple projects have a larger proportion of costs related to software licenses, and adding 25% for support and services give a good approximation to the total budget.

However when estimating budgets for larger deployments with more complex and custom requirements half of the project costs are concerned with the delivery of the custom functionality.

In my next post I will be comparing the customer costs for deploying intranets and custom frameworks through our cloud based SAAS offering, compared with a perpetual license model. I will be comparing these costs over a 2 year period.

Custom Development, Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Intranet, Products, Services, Solutions, The Framework cost, graph, intranet software

Every morning Claromentis Brighton staff have a meeting that helps us to stay on track, be aware of any high workload concerns or potential deadline issues – and generally keep each other informed of what’s happening. On Mondays these meetings are necessarily a little longer – most days they can be done and dusted in 30 minutes.

What interests me is that as a company that actually creates information management software and collaboration frameworks we still seem to need a multiple of formats, environments and tools to keep track of everything.

1. We start the meeting around a large screen format of our own intranet calendar for the week, going through client visits at our office, who’s out and related time bound events that calendars were designed to show. On the agenda AOB allow each person to add anything for discussion.

2. We then move over to 2 whiteboards that use felt pens and magnets to summarize on one board all the new intranets and systems we are installing, and on the other all the bespoke development projects we have ongoing with our clients. This is strictly a stand up meeting, which is very helpful to keep things fast moving and focused. As each project is summarized it gets a physical magnet in column one – colored according to a simple traffic light system. Other columns reflect responsibilities, alpha and beta deadlines, urgency levels for priority task selection and a whole host of other data.

collaboration meeting

Often people will refer to our project management software to get deadline and assignment information as needed in the meeting.

3. Before concluding each person gets about 30 seconds to say what they are doing today, and request cooperation from anyone else.

When necessary we will have our colleagues n Russia and Australia join us on video conference, but 99 percent of the time this is a fairly local event.

So my observations are :

1. Its an evolving meeting, everyone can suggest better ways to do things and I think that’s very important – no-one should view themselves as a prisoner, and everyone finds them useful.

2. We seem to need one part when we are sitting down, then a second part when we are all standing up. I have no idea why.

3. We require our calendar ( software ) , whiteboards ( hardware ), pens, magnets, erasers and project management software to get the job done. Together with blank notebooks.

4. Everyone turns up with a pen and paper, hardly anyone writes anything down.

5. Some people bring task lists from their own desks, which often seem to be quite literally written on the back of an envelope.

6. Even though we are all really busy and all trying to collaborate – some people just talk more than others.

So my question is – is this meeting format, which we have evolved into over a long time – simply a good way to deal with the fact that all people are different both in the way they absorb information and interact with others? After all our own project software has Gantt charts, document management, assignments and traffic lights – but you can’t stick magnets on it and if you talk to it it doesn’t answer back.

Our meetings are designed to request and receive participation – you do have to say what you are working on, and everyone will certainly listen to you. Maybe that’s the point – anyone can look at a programme plan and miss a lot of pressure points that the people will chose to talk about when given the opportunity. And that is what collaboration is all about – helping each other through issues, communicating with clients and getting the job done to the highest possible standard given the available resources and time lines.

And I enjoy them!

Intranet-Extranet, Prod-Project, The Framework collaboration, intranet software

We have had so many discussions recently about how to establish legitimate boundaries for modern intranet software.

At a recent vision setting meeting at Claromentis we did decide that we would never produce accountancy software – but the only reason seemed to be because Nigel thinks its boring and no-one else in the room understood much about it. Hardly a valid rule for deciding when business functionality should be excluded form our product set looking out beyond Claromentis 6.0

If you think about it, as well as the API for bespoke applications, we now have major application sets for:

Information management across every imaginable file type through to online
Collaboration and Innovation
Sales Management
Project Management
Image Management
MarComms
Across the board Quality Management solutions

As we move into a world where it seems the browser can deliver just about anything to the desktop and client software is dying faster than newspapers, it seems that at Claromentis the only rules we can find for a product line in our intranet system is :

It makes a difference to a business
It is aesthetically beautiful and highly usable
It leverages the permission system

Can anyone come up with a better rule for helping us not to deliver accountancy software as part of an intranet? Seriously – where should we stop? How can we say – “but that is just not what an intranet should do”?

Intranet-Extranet, The Framework bespoke development, intranet software

One of the core values of Claromentis is clarity – we really do try to avoid any chance of confusion wherever we can.

I was reminded of this at a project kick off meeting this week, where some of the client staff had got into the mindset of focusing on “content management” in the discussion, when in fact their intent was to get the best plan for “information management” in the first phase of the project.

Left unchecked this could have resulted in much of the day being focused on entirely the wrong requirement for project success. What was needed was not a detailed discussion of best practices in content management, but a much more open debate about what information platforms were best suited to various sets of data that the client needed to migrate to Claromentis. Managing an information layer is not about content management – but content management is indeed a part of the puzzle.

Examples like this in themselves are innocuous, but they demonstrate again and again that as a supplier of customizable collaboration platforms our responsibility is to add clarity to the potentially confusing world when relatively wide ranging IT projects get underway.

The Framework intranet software

I was at a meeting today with some key staff from one of the UKs largest companies, kicking off the deployment of Claromentis for the holding company.

The deployment is for 10-20,000 staff, and during the meeting the CIO made an interesting side comment about smaller collaboration systems, saying “who needs an intranet when you only have 200 users – you can just shout”.

This is something we have often discussed internally as very small companies deploy intranets and collaboration software – in fact the smallest Claromentis license is for just 25 users – at which level you would think you wouldn’t even need to raise your voice.

But of course some very small companies in terms of staff numbers – such as consultancy practices we have worked with – might have onsite and global staff in almost as many locations as they have people – as teams are deployed to various client offices to provide professional services. These individuals, by the nature of their job, absolutely do need secure web based access to version controlled best practice guidelines, white papers, templates and collateral from the company intranet.

Using out of date information can adversely impact their ability to provide advice that represents the current view of their organization – and conversely not being able to write results back to the intranet will constrain the growth in IP of the company as consultants gain expertise in their relevant sectors. So in these, and many other similar cases, intranets for very small companies become very meaningful and material to the company’s ability to deliver results.

As we have engaged with companies to provide social networking portals we have of course come across the theoretical limit of Dunbar’s number – the supposedly cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain a meaningful and stable social relationship.

These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. A commonly referenced limit for Dunbar’s number is 150.

On that basis maybe the CIO today had it just about right – in the hopefully unlikely event that you have no other friends outside work then once you get over a couple of hundred staff you absolutely do need some technical help to remember who they all are, how they relate to each other and what they all do.

Standing by the water cooler and shouting is officially no longer an option.

Intranet-Extranet, The Framework intranet, SME