Intranet Management Software Blog

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

As 2008 draws to a close it is interesting to reflect on the challenges companies of all sizes now face as they try to embrace permissioned information management as a way to foster creativity, improve collaboration on all fronts -  internally, with the supply chain and with customers -  and to become more efficient.

Information management is a fast moving world, and one that has always been a victim of confusing terminology and liable to disconnect between IT and the business. Just a few short years ago intranet platforms were nothing more than permissioned HTML resources with some forum and people based functionality. They were weak, but understandable – with clear boundaries.

Now intranet software vendors like Claromentis offer an enormous range of functionality across the business, and embrace every format of data into a single, managed information layer.

Not only that but they offer process management to automate inefficient processes by applying form based work flows, and even project management tools that simply were outside the lines of this space an internet heartbeat ago.

As a personal view, based on years of implementing intranet and extranet projects around the world for every conceivable type of company, I have the following a my top challenges that the client should really pay attention to at the end of 2008:

• Dedicated resource
• The offer of grass roots involvement for all departments within scope
• A well presented but flexible road map for the project with proper phasing of business goals
• Clarity
• A solution that can leverage open source developers – that is the irresistible tide for the coming years
• Commercial support
• An intranet vendor with great design skills
• Single sign on
• Ability to turn off old information stores
• A vision that lasts beyond short term excitements

Nice to haves :

• A project name
• Top level sponsorship
• Unified branding with all other brand experiences
• Lightning fast infrastructure
• Proper staging environments

I welcome comments on what you see as important intranet success factors!

As we have mentioned on many other blogs, given all of this power and the huge amount of information and procedures even SME companies have – I truly believe that once you have selected a good vendor to meet your own individual company needs, the single most important intranet success factor is making a dedicated resource available. It you cannot do that, then make a senior resource available on a 50% basis, and allocate budget to get a lot of service assistance from your vendor!

A successful project really does need time and effort.

Solutions intranet roadmap, intranet software discussions

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