So, why aren’t all operations teams, and the techies themselves, falling over each other to embrace tools like Puppet, SumoLogic, and other DevOps/Automation tools? Clearly some organizations are embracing them. Why not all of them? I have few of my own ideas here, and I would like to hear yours as well.

1. The move from “Artist” to “Manager” is not natural

Back when I started in IT, most IT admins “owned” a small collection of devices or applications. Server admins owned a handful of servers, database admins a few databases, network admins a few switches and firewalls, etc. They controlled access to their systems jealously, and took personal pride in their operation. They were artists, and their systems, and the way those systems were managed, were an art form. As IT budgets have shrunk, and the load on IT increased, this level of care is impossible.

Yet, you still find many admins jealously guarding their root access privileges, instead of moving to a shared responsibility model with other admins. Why? I think it is the same reason why I feel such satisfaction after cooking a meal, building new shelves in my garage, or fixing a leaky faucet. I did it myself, and it feels good to start and finish something. Participating in automated processes can be deeply unsatisfying. That is why admins need to learn new skills, and find new pride in the quality of their automation or find satisfaction in steadily improving quality.

2. Using Automation may seem like losing control

One conversation from my IT past sticks in my mind more than any other. I was on site with a customer trying to explain the benefits of automation to a group of systems administrators. One system admin floored me by insisting that she could more accurately, and more quickly, make changes to 20 UNIX servers than I could ever do with automation. It was like some modern version of John Henry calling me out to some man vs. machine contest, and subtly decrying the inhumanity of my automation tool. I can’t even remember my answer now, but this perspective is at the root of much of the push-back against automation and DevOps. Instead of looking at the business outcome – better experience and value for the customer – some frustrated system admins see these new ideas as a direct affront to the quality of their work. This is precisely why I think the fundamental shift in DevOps is from a internal IT focus to an external customer focus. That way admins can measure their success by customer impact. Not an easy change to make, but it is essential for IT’s continued relevance.

3. Change seems hard/bad/unnatural/unneeded

Isn’t the root of the resistance here really the natural tendency to resist change? On the other hand, how many times have operations teams been assured that the latest IT fad will reduce their workload and improve quality, only to see the opposite happen? So what’s different about DevOps? I think I could write a whole blog entry just on that, but a few things come to mind. First, the focus is on customer value, which greatly simplifies priorities. Second, it’s all about outcomes, not process for the sake of process. Finally, it is all about continuous improvement driven by the experience of the people on the frontline. This means that admins must be rewarded going forward for doing things that increase customer value, rather than putting out fires or pleasing angry executives.

So, it all comes back to culture – surprise, surprise. I think this will be the primary challenge of DevOps going forward. How do we overcome the IT culture so resistant to change, while providing an attractive way for all of those systems administrators to breathe easily in their new roles?

1. Daily deals: 53%
2. Internet ads: 51%
3. Web listing sites: 38%
4. Social media ads: 37%
5. Online coupons: 29%

Deals/coupons are great sales tools to attract new customers. www.drivingschoolmanager.com.au hosted business solution for driving schools includes a customer acquisition module, smartDEALS which allows the business to create and offer package deals and offers to customers through all channels including online, booking office and in car via the instructor.

Package deals is one of the most popular sales offers used in driving schools to attract customers.

The unique feature of www.drivingschoolmanager.com.au is the integrated accounting for customers and service providers which extends to the smartDEALS module. The module also manages expiry dates, cancellation forfeiture policies, receipting, voucher dispatch and an integrated payment gateway.

Read the full article for a detailed summary of the survey results http://www.marketingprofs.com/charts/2013/10288/small-business-marketing-top-tools-for-finding-and-keeping-customers

How are each of you doing this morning?

First, I cannot thank each of you enough for your continued support and interest in reading this content. I remain humbled and appreciative of each of you.

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The newest edition of, “Small Business Owner Weekly Review” has been published, and we have assembled a variety of editorial compositions covering the areas of:

(*) Leadership Development
(*) Importance of Digital Strategy
(*) Considerations Re: Hiring a Small Business Attorney
(*) Life Leadership
(*) Business Letterhead Printing and Design
(*) Telecommuting – Is It Necessary?
(*) Planning with Precision
(*) Strategic Planning In a Family
(*) Personal Insights Re: Wisdom and the Mother Bear Project

http://paper.li/f-1358031356

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Our contributing Small Business Owners include:

(*) Donna Grossman with That Girl Knitz
(*) Jane Porter with Entrepreneur Magazine
(*) Katherine Tattersfield with PrintFirm.com
(*) Janet Levine with Janet Levine Consulting

Our contributing freelance writers include:

(*) Christine Gess
(*) George Moser
(*) Phillip Brittain
(*) Lachlan Fennen
(*) Subbu Iyer

Our contributing businesses include:

(*) Henslowe Irving Cultural Consultants

==========

I would encourage each of you to take a few moments to review the commentaries; editorials; and articles of our fellow business owners; professionals; and colleagues.

I will thank each of you in advance for your thoughtful considerations and please do have a very enjoyable morning…

Click On Below Link…..

BPO

Of course, I would encourage all questions, insights, thoughts, and commentary as appropriate.

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General Introduction

The reliance on a Leader’s facilitation in the entrustment of others to support a purpose is the core essence of Intellectual Commitment.

Intellectualistic appealing purpose encompasses the spectrum of:

• Speculative Creativity;
• Imagination;
• Introspective Reflection;
• Divergent forms of thinking (i.e., brainstorming) and;
• Convergent Forms of Thinking (i.e., synthesis).

The responsibilities of the Leader include:

• Fostering individuals to become emotionally impelled;
• Agree (or pledge) to do something in the future and;
• Become more than they are – more than they could become by their own solitary efforts.

==========

Omni works with hundreds of distributors and manufacturers to procure everything for their entire luxury hotel portfolio.  With distributors constantly changing pricing on goods to reflect market shifts, Jim needed a technology solution to ensure that the hotels received the products and prices that were originally contracted.  In other words, Jim needed to ensure better compliance, and BirchStreet provided the answer – enabling near 20/20 visibility into Omni’s spend – with a guarantee of real-time pricing.

Omni and BirchStreet have worked together to deploy functionality that enables Omni to take a credit from suppliers when products are delivered at a higher price than contracted.  For example, if Omni places an order on a Thursday, the order details, including UOM and pricing, are transmitted from Omni to the distributor and then from the distributor to Omni’s BirchStreet platform. This functionality provides insight and accountability. Even if the distributor’s system updates the price before delivery to Omni, Omni only pays the price given at the time of purchase.

Jim states that this functionality has prevented hundreds of thousands of dollars in discrepancies and overage charges.

In addition to streamlining the procure-to-pay cycle, Omni’s system, and its built-in data warehouse, provides real-time visibility and analytics across all of their properties, as well as top-down control over product choices, brand standards, supplier contract compliance and purchasing procedures and controls.

Now that’s what we call purchasing best practices!

Large enterprises are strange beasts.  On one hand they can be early adopters because they’ve got the financial ability to talk a little risk, make a change.  On the other, they stick with something ‘traditional’ because it’s safe.  Most enterprises are dabbling with Cloudy stuff, but not taking full advantage, because it’s difficult.

It’s not the Cloud services that are difficult – it’s changing the ingrained processes within the company that’s difficult.

Enterprises want customised solutions that fit with their existing methods of working.  This can be done, at a cost, over time.  Let’s take SalesForce.com as an example.  I’ve spoken to folks who love using their company’s system, while others from different companies consider it the bane of their lives!  Good customisation versus bad.

Customisation of services isn’t always practical or cost effective for smaller companies.  It’s these businesses that settle for the vanilla offering.  This isn’t something they really want to do, but in this instance, it could be to their advantage.

A businesses’s ability to adapt their internal processes to the generic version of a cloud service can allow for faster realisation of the benefits of Cloud.

It’s the small and medium sized businesses that can quickly adapt that will see the benefits of cloud soonest.

Most companies are just starting to hear about crowd computing. The term keeps coming up in context of topics that are already important to them — topics like cloud computing, crowdsourcing, outsourcing, artificial intelligence, and distributed work.

It’s an exciting time to be where our company is in the field. Every day we’re  talking with people who are responsible for managing vast amounts of data and complex business processes. Often their work involves managing with or contracting with tens of thousands of workers across the globe. We’re in discussion with some of the smartest people out there, exploring ways to make the management of complex projects fast, efficient, transparent, and cost effective.

If you’re interested in these topics, we want to include you in the discussion. This blog is a way to keep you up to date on what we’re working on, who we’re following, and where we’ll be. We hope you’ll jump in with comments on this blog, or plan to come see us at the events and conferences we’ll be at this year.

We also want to make sure you know about the blog Crowd Computing Revolution, where key issues in crowd computing are being addressed by researchers, journalists, and leaders in that and related fields.

Welcome to the Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

Friend and colleague Dr. Nick Vitalari, has published a book about his research on the imperative for companies to become Elastic Enterprises.  Companies who do so can respond quickly to customer’s changing needs.  This week’s WRAP builds on Nick’s theme.  Harvard Blogger, Mark Pearson, managing drector of the Operations consulting group at Accenture, shared his thoughts on how Social Media Can Play A Role in Business Process Management.

Mark suggests that

Social media offers us a chance to improve the communications supporting process improvement. Leading organizations are already using the power of social media to shape their business process management (BPM) agendas. Although the use of social media in BPM may still be in its infancy, its potential for increasing the agility of business processes — allowing for change in the early stages of product development, for example — is immense. Social media in BPM can accomplish this in three ways: First, by collecting customer feedback and using it to adjust processes; second, by disseminating knowledge and increasing acceptance of new processes; and third, by helping identify which processes really contribute to competitive differentiation.

Social IT can make processes more responsive and those that manage them more informed.  Social tools make gathering and disseminating information easier, increasing transparency and improving processes.

Social business is a major theme of my research.  I define social business as the infusion of social capabilities into business processes (see my recent blog about that here).

How might you infuse social capabilities into your business processes?  What benefits can you imagine if you did?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a wonderful weekend.

In addition to managing operations, are financial systems in your company primarily for accounting purposes – reporting and compliance? Or, do they produce meaningful data for management decisions?

Historical data for reporting captures results at a point in time, and even then such data is not always timely for current decisions. What is necessary is data for meaningful analysis (customer, market, revenues, costs, expenses, margins and so on) that facilitates appropriate decisions and action by management.

If financial systems do not produce useful data in managing your business, you need to review such systems and make changes such that meaningful information is produced  on a timely basis to allow more appropriate management decisions.

Ravi Patel

www.patelCFOservices.com

My last post about ‘Who needs a test-drive?’ was a struggle. I was kind of expecting that, really….but I confess that I never expected discussions would become so personal.
But then I thought … discussions tend to get on a personal level because people are passionate about what they do in the first place and because they care (and worry) about their future.
Well… maybe (after all) discussions were great! No problem with being passionate about things.
However, I also realized that people tend to be stuck towards their own practices, and they hardly question how they are doing things. (No problem with that either, specially if it’s working).

So this post is supposed to make you think about the ‘perfect buying experience’.

At some point I noticed that ‘test-driving’ was referred to mostly as a selling tool. Of course, I strongly disagree on this. The focus should be to provide a unique experience. Give all your customers outstanding experiences and, at the end, they will buy!…well, maybe they won’t, but at least they will be talking about it…how good is that?
Oh…so you’re not getting paid on the quality of experiences you can provide? Really??…maybe this is something you should discuss internally with your boss…

I guess the problem doesn’t start on the retail level though. The problem relates to the entire supply chain and all its ‘push’ philosophy. (It was supposed to be ‘lean’…I wonder how drive was lost – don’t answer that, it’s just a rhetorical question).

Don’t get me wrong…I will continue to ‘play’ on the Internet side. But that doesn’t mean I don’t care…moreover, in a world completely focused on the virtual, this is also your chance to stand out. My opinion is that the winners  (amongst car retailers, I mean) will be the ones excelling in a multi-channel strategy.

So, what are you doing to fight for your space?

I know, I know…all the standards you have to deal with in the car industry are restraining your actions, but there must be something you can do, right?
What kind of experiences are you providing to the ones who visit your facilities, planning to see a car, to test it or even looking for maintenance?
If your answer is none because you’re too focused on selling, then you’ve got a problem to solve.

Be creative!…there are plenty of things you can do. Just a clue: forget how it’s meant to be…be disruptive!

The Product structure in AX can seem a bit confusing at first, but there are two main components: Products and Released products. A Product defines the physical attributes of an item, is shared across companies, and is assigned a Product number. A Released product defines the company specific financial, production, and warehousing settings of an item and is assigned an Item number.

In this video, the creation of the item is done from the Released product form. By starting in this form, both the Product and Released product are created at the same time.

More details on this and other processes are available in the AX 2012 Trade manual.

One of the new phrases you will have heard lately is the “Subscription Economy”. If you haven’t, where have you been? You’re kidding, of course you have. Certainly, one of the main proponents of the whole movement is the California-based Zuora; their cloud-based subscription billing system is leading the way in the industry and they’ve landed some prestigious and lucrative accounts in their short lifetime.

What they have also succeeded in doing is placing a spotlight on the area of subscription management; they’ve pointed a finger at the inadequacies of competitive products and helped to pull a new industry along in its wake. From a Salesforce.com heritage, they’ve designed a product that manages all the nuances of selling your product, allowing your customers to add more products; to downgrade or upgrade their subscription to, say, the Platinum or Bronze edition; or to cancel their subscription whether still in or out of contract; and for them to be invoiced correctly, according to your pricing and billing rules, and all the complexities that go with charging for partial months (or proration, as it is termed by Zuora).

Two industry verticals that seem like a ready fit for this type of product are Telecoms and Media (of course, there are many more); typically, their products are sold on a continual basis; often, there is a regular product “delivery”, coupled with a regular payment. The shifting patterns of product offerings and industry change mean that businesses operating in these circles need to be able to move rapidly when launching new products; and it’s not unusual for many different versions of a product to be made available through the various sales channels.

The Reality Of Accounting

But this flexibility brings new challenges. Many CFOs today come from a static environment where accounting practices and rules have not changed, literally, in decades. OK, they’re using accounting software to carry out bookkeeping exercises and to generate management and statutory accounts. The tools have changed but the rules and methods have not. But, what we tend to see quite often with our customers, is that a certain perspective on accounting systems accompanies this. And when we analyse the requirements of our customers, what they want can be boiled down to something simple: the porting of their old systems to new systems. Sadly, this brings baggage with it: significant cost, long project timescales and ultimately a huge amount of customisation (often tying the customer to a fixed version of the packaged software underpinning their new system). What is lost is considerable:

1. system agility
2. the ability to take advantage of new software releases
3. the ability to move forward with a small software maintenance footprint

In short, you may end up with a stifled product feature set due to excessive customisation

How can we address these problems? When you move house, you don’t take along all of your accumulated tat and clutter; you use the opportunity to dump the stuff you don’t need. Therefore, what businesses need when implementing new systems is a sort of “mental skip”. Thought processes and indeed business processes often need to be realigned to take advantage of the new technologies on offer; otherwise, what’s the point? How you handle such change is the subject of another discussion in its own right, and I’m not going there today. But the point remains.

An Example

I would like to look at specifics now: let’s say your business sends invoices to its customers regularly, but sometimes it has to issue credit notes; sending the wrong product, or it arrives late, or is damaged; someone cancelling due to poor service delivery; there are many reasons why you might issue a credit (with an accompanying refund in some cases). In business jargon, there are many use cases. Under a traditional accounting system you would initiate the issuance of the credit (and possible refund) through your standard process: there would be some validation, probably an approval process, then you would need to create the transaction in the accounting system, along with the necessary paperwork and reversal of any fulfilment aspects of the supply.

The Finance department would usually have ownership of the financial aspect of the transaction; and this impinges greatly on the process, regardless of the solution. I don’t mean that as a negative, it’s the necessary reality. They usually have audit and control responsibility and they rightly take that very seriously.

But then they start to impose the “old” process conditions on the “new” system; for example, only a full credit will be acceptable, and a new invoice will be issued to cover the “delta” i.e. what the customer actually bought vs. what was returned/refunded. Perhaps they need a 1:1 match between the credit and the original invoice.

The problem with this is that, in a Zuora landscape (or, more precisely, a subscription landscape), it doesn’t work. Not without customisation. Zuora works on the basic premise that you start with version 1 of the sale (or subscription, really). Any change after that will give you version 2, version 3, ad infinitum. It uses its own mechanism, known as an Amendment, to manage changes.

Why Does This Problem Occur?

Now that we have a specific example, we can start to look at why this is the case. I have some theories, and I think they’re correct. I’ve seen it with several customers.

1. People use the word “subscription” but haven’t thought about what the word really means
2. In a new systems environment, new tools, metrics and controls will apply
3. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the accountant’s view of the system (and his requirements) are still valid and important; but when we port old systems to new systems blindly, ultimately it is the solution that is flawed. It just doesn’t match the reality of subscription management.

I will address the three points above in turn.

1. What Is A Subscription?

It’s an interesting question, and one that I think has an easy answer:
“A Subscription is a sale where there is a recurring element to the provision of (and, usually, the payment for) goods or services.”

Contrast this with transaction-based selling, where you sell once, the customer pays once, and the process is complete. And ask yourself the question: are you thinking Subscription but practicing Transaction? Is there a finite start and end date associated with the deals you are labelling as Subscriptions? If so, I would dare to venture that this is not a true Subscription. Perhaps you have to go through a defined renewal process to re-engage with the client, and to effectively re-sell to them.

2. What New Tools, Metrics and Controls Will Apply?

The answer to this is a little more complex. But once you have gotten your head around the first question and resolved it internally, it starts to become clearer. And your business may have to adapt to a better, more efficient way of carrying out the business of selling so that it can take advantage of new tools and build new measurement metrics. The controls will follow once the process is optimal.

The new metrics are touched upon in this blog.

Old numbers, metrics and measures still apply but a subscription business needs these new metrics to plan ahead successfully.

Read Denis Pombriant’s blog post which also makes reference to new metrics vs. the ERP mindset.

3. What Is The Preferred Solution?

There are several components that go to make up the preferred solution. But they will always have the following characteristics:

• Little or no customisation
• A good product fit
• An optimal business process

All of the above are ideals, and are usually hard to achieve fully. But we should always strive towards them. They are laudable aims for any new systems implementation project; they usually yield faster returns, better adoption and enhanced product trust. There’s a bigger discussion to be had around topics such as process mapping, business process re-engineering, change management and operational culture, but I cannot do them justice here.

The Nub, Gist And Central Point

By now, you may be inwardly urging me to make my point. And rightly so. It is this:
In a subscription-based Zuora systems landscape, you can make best use of their product by re-thinking how you sell and account for sales. Rather than a collection of discrete transactions, I will coin this phrase: the Subscription Continuum. Your business interacts with your customers on a regular basis and your transactions are regular also. But there’s another point to consider: the customer may be engaged in several subscription “streams” with you; if they are buying several products from you, they may have several subscriptions running in parallel. They all form part of a continuum of transactions, in fact real subscriptions. This mindset change may appear trivial, but it is huge.

More to this point, let’s take the case where a customer has purchased several subscriptions from you. Assume that Product A, Service B and Product C were bought at different times and their monthly payments may or may not have been aligned to the same date every month, depending on your business practices. You don’t really want to issue three invoices per month to the same customer, do you? Perhaps you do, but you have that flexibility too. Maybe the customer upgrades from Service B Basic to Service B Gold, so he has to pay a little extra every month, but for his first month he upgraded mid-month, so you need to calculate a pro-rated additional amount to charge.

What I’m trying to demonstrate here is the level of complexity possible in the subscription world. And I’ve only really touched on the possibilities. You don’t really want to get into the position of having to re-engineer your software to cope with these possibilities. It’s a complex calculation when you get into the intricate workings of a Rating and Billing Engine (RBE) such as Zuora. The keys are

1. education (in how Zuora works out of the box)
2. simplicity (in your product offerings, payment options, pricing)
3. flexibility (re-thinking how you manage your sales accounting)

You don’t have to re-invent the wheel.

Easy, right?

Whether your potential customer is a Fortune 500 brand or a startup, there are significant benefits to establishing a thorough client vetting process:

Cost Reduction – By weeding out customers that will present a variety of compliance and deliverability issues, you will reduce back end costs.

Improved Reputation – By doing your homework on prospects, you’ll help improve the overall reputation of your IPs. There is a most definitely guilt by association; doing business with bad actors will have serious repercussions.

Improved Performance – With the improvement in reputation comes the added benefit of an improvement in performance. What you’re trying to avoid here is the paradigm of garbage in-garbage out.

Value Add to the Customer – If best practice recommendations are made during the vetting process, not only will you proactively solve potential issues, you’ll also provide the customer with a valuable service before they send their first email.

This is just the tip of the iceberg.  There are plenty of other benefits.  Of course effective client vetting doesn’t come without its challenges.  In this series, we will offer some tips and recommendations when it comes to creating highly effective client vetting.

Besides the reasons we outlined above, there are numerous other benefits to good customer vetting. If you know your customer’s you can better service their needs, address their pain points and help them build a successful business. Like the habits employed by the most efficient workers in the world, we think there’s a construct to describe good customer vetting practices. We’re calling this the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Customer Vetting. To be clear, this isn’t the only way to do it, but it’s worked well for us and may help you tighten up your own standards to ensure the success of your existing and future customers. Without further ado, the first of our 7 Habits of Highly Effective Client Vetting:

Habit One: Be Proactive

No Free Passes – Start with consistency and a level playing field for all customers and prospects. Regardless of how you came in contact with a potential customer, through a referral, your mother’s cousin’s brother’s in-law’s best friend from summer camp, or through a lead gen campaign, it’s the same process. The associated risks are the same for a referral or for an inbound lead, they must be vetted in exactly the same way in order to ensure best practices, positive engagement and ongoing good reputation.

Get to know your potential client.  Understand the entity as a whole.  Look at items such as tax records and other public records.  Can they pay their bills?  How long have they been around?

Understand their relationship with their own customers.  Use public resources such as the Better Business Bureau to research customer complaints.  Are there reports of fraud?

Get to know the executives at the company – have they worked for known abusive senders in the past?  By get to know we’re not suggesting you go through their trash like in a spy thriller, but take the time to see what they’ve done in the past and the kind of companies they’ve worked for or with.

Gain a full understanding of the business.  Does it make logical sense? Creating a business and website is easy, as a matter of fact, for the latter there are an estimated 644 Million websites in the world today. To give you an idea of scope, that’s roughly twice the population of the United States.  As we’re all aware, not every website is there to benefit the humanity, some are malicious attack sites that have but one purpose: to defraud anyone that visits them.  Sometimes detecting a fraudulent business is as easy as just using common sense and taking a critical look at what their Internet properties are trying to accomplish.

Contact information is valuable  - any contact information the potential client shares is a valuable data point so use it, research it, and validate it.  Utilize Google to look up names, physical addresses, phone numbers, contact names, and email addresses.

Another way to think about vetting, or the need to be thorough during the process, is the difference between our system of justice where you are innocent until proven guilty and the Napoleonic code where you were guilty until proven innocent. This is not unlike the shift in how ISPs viewed IPs with no mailing history. At some point in the evolution of IP and domain reputation, ISPs began to view an IP without a mailing history as potentially suspect. Once upon a time, new IPs were worth their weight in gold. Because of abuse the posture that ISPs assumed with new IPs was one of reserve and scrutiny. We’re not advocating paranoia, but a healthy level of suspicion isn’t a bad idea.

The more proactive research you do on the way in, the more protected you are in the long run.  Think of a customer as a potential investment.  Before you pour money into a potential investment, you do a fair amount of research.  This is no different – the Internet is expansive.  Utilize it to the best of your advantage.

Coming Soon: Habit Two: Begin with the End in Mind

-Tim Moore
Director of Customer Performance

What can corporate leaders learn from Nick Saban and his process? Here are the key steps:

1. Define the vision. What kind of program/company do you want to have?

2. Identify the implementation plan to get there. (As one anonymous politician said, “A vision without a plan is a hallucination.”)

3. Determine the principles and values that are important for success.

4. Create and implement the plan to get people to buy into it.

5. Define expectations of the people who need to execute.

6. Micromanage but with a purpose. (If you have an institutionalized system then people know what is important and you can spend your time innovating, making it better.)

7. Find the best ways to develop your people.

8. Hold contingency meetings. (Saban calls them “what-if meetings.)

9. Express confidence in your people.

10. Speak with one voice.

11. If things go wrong, look in the mirror.

12. It’s about the journey.

Congratulations Coach Saban! I am sure that you are already focused on 2013.

A Great Product Life Cycle Process is the Framework of a Great Company

If you work in high tech, then chances are you follow some sort of product life cycle process — it’s the structure imposed on the development of a software product from the moment the idea materializes until the product must be retired. The question is: how good is the product life cycle process that your company uses? Should you optimize your product life cycle process to be more effective?

• Do your company’s departments all work in silos, handing off work via Project Managers?
• Do cross-departmental deliverables arrive late, incorrect, or insufficient?
• Is company awareness of what major projects are being worked on very low?
• Do your products or features have a tendency to fail in the market?
• Is there little to no project transparency for major projects?
• Is there a lack of individual accountability?
• Do you often have to complete tasks that are not part of your job description?
• Does your company suffer from project bottlenecks?
• Are critical or late-stage resources constantly stressed and overworked due to receiving dependency materials too late?
• Is your product bloated with features guided by the HIPPO (HIghest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the room?
• Do products get released and then get abandoned?
• Do projects get going and forget to include the right people until it’s too late?
• Do you find yourself with questions about the project and not knowing who to ask?
• Does your company seem to have arbitrary release dates and budgetary planning?

If you answered ‘Yes’ to any of those questions, it sounds like your product lifecycle could use an update.

What is a Product Life Cycle Process?

A product life cycle’s (or PLC for short) main goal is to ensure that the right people are working on the right projects at the right time. It identifies what tasks need to be completed in order to bring a product to market, as well as who is accountable for each task, who is responsible for approving each task/deliverable, at what point in the cycle each tasks needs to be completed, and so on. You can think of each product as having a point of conception (defining the idea of the product), then moving through an elaboration period (defining the specifics of the product) before going through the actual construction of the product (development), and then being released. And it doesn’t end there — a good product life cycle also accounts for the maintenance of that product (refining and adding additional features), measuring its success or failure, and eventually determining an “end of life” plan for it when it becomes technologically unsustainable, or irrelevant to the market or business.

While there are a plethora of process styles to choose from (each with their own varied approaches and timelines to essentially the same set of tasks or activities that need to take place), the two basic frameworks are Waterfall and Iterative (most commonly referred to as “Agile”).

Waterfall Product Lifecycle Process

An illustration of the Waterfall model (source: http://blog.hydro4ge.com/waterfall-to-boehm/)

According to Wikipedia, “the waterfall model is a sequential design process, often used in software development processes, in which progress is seen as flowing steadily downwards (like a waterfall) through the phases of Conception, Initiation, Analysis, Design, Construction, Testing, Production/Implementation, and Maintenance.” I couldn’t have said it better myself . Basically, the Waterfall model’s aim is to plan a product 100% before handing over a “how to” guide of fully completed functional specifications to Development to build it. The spirit of this concept is to crystalize each team member’s efforts within a phase — the Business folk huddle up from Conception to Analysis, then hand it over to the Design team who create the mockups per their requirements, then they hand everything over the fence to Development for Construction, Testing, and Implementation. Waterfall models generally work best for cultures that demand order and structure.

Pros and Cons of Waterfall Model

Pros:

• Predictive model front-loads risk to planning phases
• Departments stay focused on specific tasks
• Emphasis on planning and research
• Staged approach enforces discipline
• Roles + tasks are well-defined
• Progress is easy to define through Waterfall’s use of milestones
• Use of full functional specifications make it easier to work with remote developers

Cons:

• Stifles collaborative creativity
• Difficult to anticipate and plan for all customer requirements
• Does not adapt to change well
• Does not fold in all departmental feedback during the planning process
• Takes a long time for something to be built
• Designs often need substantial rework once they get to development

Iterative or “Agile” Product Lifecycle Process

An illustration of the Agile process (source: http://www.sohamgreens.com/process.html)

“Agile projects are paintings, not photographs.” – Unknown

“Agile software development is a group of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. It promotes adaptive planning, evolutionary development and delivery, a time-boxed iterative approach, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change,” (thanks again, Wikipedia!). Basically, Agile methodologies are all about focusing on getting features out into the wild as quickly as possible, and then learning from metrics and customer feedback. It encourages internal feedback from all departments, embraces speed and change, and eschews thorough documentation. Agile methodologies work best in cultures that respond well to change.

Pros and Cons of Agile Methodologies

Pros:

• Encourages collaboration throughout the entire process
• Fast development cycles called “sprints”
• Products receive real-world market feedback quickly
• Adaptive model makes responding to change easier

Cons:

• Development spends more time planning, less time coding
• Risk of releasing unviable features is heightened
• Less time for market research and planning
• Lack of documentation can prove challenging
• Dangerous for mission critical projects due to iterative nature

So Which Product Life Cycle Process is Best?

Which product life cycle process is “the best”? The question really should be, which product life cycle process is best for your company. My next post will address why a company should invest in implementing a tailor-made product lifecycle process; and future posts will detail how to determine which product life cycle process is right for your company (SPOILER ALERT: it’ll most likely be a mix of the frameworks above), and how to properly roll it out to the company.

Next up in the Product Life Cycle series:

Part II: The Benefits and Risks of Implementing a Product Lifecycle Process