Intranet Management Software Blog

We’ve been working on this feature for several weeks and now I am delighted to reveal what is “Discuss” to you all.

Discuss is chat feature built right in the Claromentis Intranet Manager. There is no additional configuration or chat client install like Yahoo, or MSN, it just works straight on your browser.

Simply click discuss bar to initiate Discuss and then choose the person you wish to have a chat with. You can hide the discuss window if you want to carry on working.

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Having involved with many projects in various scales, I can see that in general there are 3 types of projects:

1.  A project with no vision

A project with no vision is a bit like life without a purpose. The project exists for the sake of having the project itself. It is almost destined to be doomed even with enough resources to make it happen. There are too many IT projects failures, many of which are due to this problem. Of course no one wants to admit there is no vision, of course they can pretend they have a vision or basically borrow one from someone else – but normally they are just too abstract and meaningless.

2.    Project with vision but no execution

Good, now we are one step closer. We have clear vision for the project but the problem is we don’t know how to execute it. Having a vision without plan and execution is just like having a good idea with no outcomes.
We know how hard it is to execute good idea, and a good idea remains just a good idea until it has been executed.

3. Project with vision and execution

Right, I think we nailed it this time; we’ve got the clear vision and know exactly what needs to be done to execute it.  As we all know having a clear plan and the right resources to execute it is a great recipe to a successful project.

At the end of the day the outcome of successful project heavily depends on execution and control.  We all know things aren’t work according to the plan. Determination, passion and continuous control is perhaps worth more than the vision itself in the real world. The Japanese called this “Kaizen” (Continuous Improvement).

Services development vision, internal customer communications, intranet project manager

Background

I’ve been asked to create a blog to share our experience managing priorities in an intranet development roadmap.  Like any other software development we’re swamped with enhancement request raised by our clients, international partners well as internally.

Managing requests

By the time this blog is written I have to deal with 500 active requests which need reviewing, examining, clarification, discussion, prioritising, and the most important thing “execution”, in an extremely limited time.

Say if I am incredibly productive and I only have to spend 10 minutes for each tickets, it would take me more than 10 days just to reviewing this tickets without any further action such as examining or writing clarification request.

Dealing with priorities

Perhaps it would take a month before an execution of these tickets can be performed.
There are many technique you can use to help dealing with priorities, one of the most popular one is by calculating the “degree of importance”, where you have to weigh each request by creating a score card. Each card is measured from different aspect such as:

•    Number of clients who has requesting such feature
•    Development time & cost to develop
•    Impact on existing system
•    Potential future sales benefits
•    Current trend & Market analysis
•    Available budget and resources

The Dilemma

Before you know it, we might have to spend more time developing a robust system rather than dealing with the request itself. Sure if you are a large organisation you might have resources to deal or an existing system to deal with this dilemma.

If you are in a small organisation this may sounds like an impossible task. Statistically I might only have less than 5 seconds to deal with each ticket and use the precious time to actually “do-something”.

Blink

A book published by Malcolm Gladwell In 2005 “Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking” describes the popular idea of  “thin-slicing”: ability to gauge what is really important from a very narrow period of experience. In other words, spontaneous decisions are often as good as—or even better than—carefully planned and considered ones.

It may sounds bizarre and obviously the management won’t like this approach, but sometime in real life, if you are experienced enough you will develop strong intuition. Time is limited and you’ve got to do the “right thing” with all the limitation around you.

Claromentis Development Schedule

Reflecting this back with Claromentis development schedule, we have managed to produce what we called “Rapid development” when developing an intranet software. This means new features are efficiently developed, tested, user-tested, and deployed to the client faster than before at equal or better quality at the same time we’ve managed to implement strict budget control with limited time & resources in current economic downturn.

The idea is simple, quick and accurate decision, spend it efficiently where it should be.

Services development vision, internal customer communications, intranet roadmap

Over the past few years there has been tremendous noise about the benefits of cloud computing, but in reality many businesses are still struggling with the idea.  From what I heard there are 3 main concerns:

Where is my data?

It’s a human nature that we still pretty much need physical contact. The idea that our data will be located among millions of others somewhere which we don’t know exactly is scary.  Some might still think our data is equivalent of piece of paper stored in unknown place with millions of other papers.

Security

We all heard the benefit that could computing in a managed infrastructure will guarantee security, from the latest patches of the OS up to cross-continental back-ups. Most organisations are still concern about security of cloud computing even though it is a safer than leaving it in your office and you find out the next day the office was flooded.

Change

One issue related to cloud computing is the concern of IT Downsizing. As more and more services related to IT become outsourced and centralized many IT jobs will become obsolete. Some says cloud computing will flourish in current economic situation but in the other hand businesses are facing difficult decisions.

Share your thoughts
Do you think cloud computing is suitable for your organisation? Share your thoughts and read more about claromentis model of software deployment.

Solutions cloud computing, development vision, intranet, intranet consultancy, software, technology, web 2.0

Aurora

This week Mozilla labs took step to open up its idea factory asking for community help to develop next big ideas for the future browsers.

They said, “You don’t have to be a software engineer to get involved, and you don’t have to program,” says the announcement. “Everyone is welcome to participate. We’re particularly interested in engaging with designers who have not typically been involved with open-source projects. And we’re biasing towards broad participation, not finished implementations.”

It’s the design, mockups, prototypes time for everyone who are welcomed to contribute. It looks like Mozilla not even worried if their major competitors would tap into the ideas gathered.

Solutions browser, development vision, future, technology

One of the hardest processes to define and implement successfully is how to gear our development for ultimate product success – with consequent rewards in terms of commercial rewards and client satisfaction.
Over the 10 years since we formed Claromentis Limited here in the UK, we will always defend vehemently that we listen to our customers. On the flip side the strategic vision always rests with Michael, Alexander and I.

For example we have resisted many times requests to provide accountancy as a core application or even as some kind of an integration toolkit, because that just is not a core expertise and that is not where we want Claromentis to move towards.But sometimes it is not so easy to defend why for example sales opportunity management is definitely a core direction for us, but accountancy is not. Both are key requirements for our clients – generating beans and counting them. Why did we wholeheartedly embrace the request to develop Quality Management Software, but resist what was codenamed for 2 years CRM2 – and centred on marketing?

Personally I think we have this just about right, 3 people set the broad brush of where we will invest our R&D and within this defined development map customer and partner requests, through meetings and our enhancement request projects in Bugtracker and discover.claromentis.com, are kings.

For us as a company, a crucial event last year was to separate out core and bespoke development resources, without that I think we would always have struggled to be nimble, agile, responsive and yet develop core releases on schedule that move onwards to where we want Claromentis Intranet Software to be.

Products development vision, intranet roadmap, quality management software