December 12, 2007

… and I just can’t hide it.

I just spent a day with our internal QSM team in McLean VA where we brainstormed about our HOT new SLIM 7.0 Release, which we’re gearing up for a market launch next quarter. Building upon Larry Putnam’s pioneering research on software lifecycles, we’ve got a new architecture that is completely adaptable to measuring, estimating, and planning Agile development projects for the software industry.

It’s no surprise many organizations today are moving toward agile methods. Two burning questions for many organizations are 1) how to prove that these methods really work and 2) how to reliably estimate and plan software projects in a dynamically changing world when requirements are in constant flux. Many of our SLIM clients are facing issues like these.

So that’s why I have this Pointer Sisters song ringing in my head. For those of you who might be reading this blog and are NOT in the software or technology industry, you’ve got to be thinking that Michael Mah has got to get a life. (I admit that it sounds a little odd that this subject gets me so worked up…)

Imagine being really psyched about something that sounds so technologically fringe and esoteric… Well, the reason I’ve got the Pointer Sisters in my head is because this is NOT fringe. I’m convinced that Fortune 500 companies today are going to realize that this newfangled thing called Agile Methods is going mainstream for many companies on the leading edge of technology. This is true whether you make software for financial services, medical, engineering, avionics, or embedded systems. As more companies race to build software that makes the smarts of the global brain, they’re going to realize that building complex information technology systems – faster and more reliable than they’ve built them before – is going to be key to growing new companies, transforming existing ones, and creating disruptive technologies that take on economic challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Now, the MANAGERS who oversee the creating of these new applications are going to need to better understand, measure, plan, and manage projects like these under ever tighter deadlines. And to do that better than pencil and paper or rudimentary bottoms-up spreadsheets, they’re going to need easy-to-use-planning and estimating tools like QSM’s SLIM Model.

We’ve taken everything that we know about making a computer help us do this (to take the load off our already overtaxed and multi-tasked minds), and to do it better than ever before. In the next two days our QSM team brainstorms more about enabling our clients to do this, and I’ll report about it here in the next few weeks.

In the meantime, we’re building easy-to-use templates for people who want to jump right into running model simulations of agile, RUP, package implementation (i.e. SAP, Oracle), or traditional waterfall projects. Some of these are already done and ready for online Webex demos. Are any of you interested in seeing these? If so, contact Sean Callaghan by email and he can arrange an appointment for you over the web.

Stay tuned for more…