Change has a considerable psychological impact on the human mind. To the fearful it is threatening because it means that things may get worse. To the hopeful it is encouraging because things may get better. To the confident it is inspiring because the challenge exists to make things better. | ||
| --King Whitney Jr.[1] | ||
Consulting for startups (as opposed to large, bureaucratic firms) is a great experience for anyone interested in the creation of process. Small companies can be fast-paced and dynamic, or they can attempt to imitate larger companies with the belief that thinking big would somehow make them big. In the world of software configuration management (SCM), however, small companies are usually just like their larger and more revenue-rich counterparts, in that their systems can be a mess. Many firms look to automation and more agile processes far down the road instead of right up front, when change is easier—and less expensive.
Change costs money. It costs time, and it takes people. So you’d think more companies would think a wee bit longer about the systems they put in place to manage their intellectual capital.
What is the value proposition for change request management software? Is it merely a way to document bugs reported by your test and engineering teams? How much have you thought about the overall process? Hopefully, in the pages to come, we’ll make the case for ClearQuest.
Traditionally, smaller firms look for a change when the competitive solution they are using stops scaling to meet their needs. This is especially true of companies experiencing “repository corruption” problems. There’s nothing like a corrupted repository that you can’t recover from to send a company toward ClearQuest.
There is a natural progression in the growth and development of a software development team or a product management organization of any size. As your team develops and your customer base expands, the problems you will encounter, the sophistication required to manage these problems, and the scope of your solutions will become more and more complex. As a result, the tools required to manage these solutions need to be scalable and flexible.
This is the complexity that created modern change management solutions—tools created to manage the many user inputs and subsequent team outputs in an organized, efficient way. To successfully develop and deliver your own change management solution, you must look at the entire change management continuum and put in place the required tools and processes, which will allow your team to successfully perform change management.
The first step is software configuration management. We wrote an entire book on the topic (The Art of ClearCase® Deployment, Addison-Wesley, 2004). The second step is your defect-tracking solution.
What are change requests, and where do they fit into your change management model? When people talk about change request solutions, they are usually referring to the tools that manage defect tracking. However, this is just one aspect of the solution. If you step back and look at the bigger picture, you’ll understand how a product like ClearQuest fits into the larger framework of how you communicate ideas across your organization. Consider these factors:
Identification: identifying problems, questions, ideas
Control: controlling workflow, providing visibility
Task prioritization: prioritizing change requests and assignments
Status: reporting status, changes, and their impacts
Audit: tracking changes, seeing trends in data
Process: ensuring that every request follows a particular lifecycle
Teamwork: monitoring team interactions, lending a hand where needed
ClearQuest is a tool that supports all of these components. And now that you understand the components, how do you convince your team of the importance of taking your change request practices to the next level? Where do you start?
Change management, in general, is all about managing the increasing complexity of a project. Your team must be prepared to manage the complexities of an ever growing, always expanding list of customer demands, enhancements, and features. Also, failure to use input from outside is a common problem in software development. Many development organizations treat the tools they use as part of a self-contained environment for generating and resolving issues. This is a problem because valuable input can also come from outside of the development team. ClearQuest is a tool that will provide you with links into the internal and external customers who will drive the direction of your products.
Participation by other user communities, including sales, marketing, management, and the customer, only improves the process and increases the value of the system to the company. An isolated, developer-centric view can cause these applications to become disposable and transient, thus never becoming part of the larger change management ecosystem.
With this engineering-centric view of the world, the other difficulty is that these systems do not encompass the larger business processes, which limits the value to the organization and prevents further expansion of processes and the formalization of a broader culture for tracking change requests. An enterprise change request solution must have robust core capabilities that adhere to a common workflow, while retaining flexibility in areas that allow it to be easily adaptable to the needs of multiple project stakeholders.
You need to understand how change requests fit into your current company workflows, how they fit into the mechanics of your version control system, and how they interact with the myriad of user and developer tools and systems. The questions you need to answer as you move forward include: What are your current processes? How strictly are they adhered to? How will a more dynamic change request solution change the way your team works? How will you administer your users? How will you prioritize your enhancements?
A critical aspect of implementing any kind of change management solution is understanding all of the actors of the system: Who needs access, and where are they located? You may all be centrally located in one office now, but what are your company’s plans for growth? Will you outsource any of your development, thus requiring coordination with outside groups? Are your primary users “power users” who are more technically savvy and therefore will want more interaction with their change requests, or will all customer input come through your own help desk organization?
Answering these questions will help you define the actors of your system, and the actors will help you better refine your CM solution and, in turn, define how ClearQuest should be refined or expanded. In Chapter 5, we will teach you how to further analyze your current system and start the planning process for your new ClearQuest deployment. First, however, it’s worthwhile to understand the value proposition for deploying ClearQuest.
Consumers all want technology that is faster, smaller, and more efficient. Arguably, the same trend is happening in our expectations in the workplace: As technology projects become more complex, we demand tools that are faster, less invasive to our existing systems, and more efficient.
Fortunately, change management systems are moving in the same direction as our expectations. They can be a powerful asset to increasing communication, productivity, and quality through process automation and integration of the tools that most engineering groups use today. Implementing some kind of CM solution will organize your development efforts around solid and repeatable processes—and by helping your team to more effectively prioritize and manage the product development lifecycle, you are more likely to meet your customers’ needs.
[A.2.1] However, one big concern of every development organization is the impact of adding a new tool or process to the existing workload and development schedule. It’s easy to get carried away with any new tool deployment. You know the basic features, and you probably have a rough idea of how the tool will fit into your company processes. For others, though, there may still be some footwork to be done to convince a manager or an executive that yet another tool will do anything to make your team—or the company—more productive at product development.
What is the value proposition for your engineers? What is the value proposition for your testers? What is the value proposition for your CM managers? What is the value proposition for your field reps? And, most importantly, what is the value proposition for your executive team?
The typical software development organization has a variety of requirements management, enhancement prioritization, and defect-tracking systems, all of which could have increased value or be improved in the following areas:
Business value
Developer-centricity
Use within business processes
Value to management
Selling the ClearQuest value into your organization can be a simple proposition, following one or more of these value themes. Or it could be like pulling teeth—depending on your current toolset (Are we duplicating current functionality?), the amount of pain your company may be going through (Will this help us respond more quickly to user demands?), or how quickly your management team responds to new ideas (We have a development team?).
The requirements for your solution may include any or all of the following:
Integrated workflow and methods for notification
Quick deployment to new teams or other user groups
Streamlined and simple user interfaces that can leverage existing processes
Easy-to-use APIs to support integration with compatible systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) help desk, or other CM systems
The ability to gauge objective, real-time project status
ClearQuest enables team members to look at the record of a change request at any time and know what has been done on it, what tasks remain to be done on it, who is working on it, when it is expected to be fixed, and so forth. Team members can stay informed about the status of a change request as work on it progresses. This can, for example, help project managers make more informed decisions about project timelines and resource allocation.
It doesn’t make much sense for us to try to identify every scenario you might encounter in selling ClearQuest into your organization, or that magic combination of requirements that will make your management team suddenly embrace the idea of adding another tool to the system. That kind of deep introspection would require a much longer book (and, to be honest, it would also cut into our consulting margins). You’ll just have to do some investigating on your own and come up with the best way to present the idea to your management chain.
What we can do, however, is give you a solid overview of what ClearQuest can do for your company so you can figure out which benefits best apply to your company’s pains.
Generally, defect- and change-tracking tools primarily benefit development, project management, and production by helping team members do the following.
Avoid duplicating efforts.
Prioritize change requests so the most important issues are resolved first.
Keep the development process on the right track by enabling team members to monitor project status as the project evolves.
Improve the level of teamwork among all participants.
Resolve differences before they become serious problems.
Establish a mechanism for constant product improvement.
Think about how these things can affect your current team and customer interactions, in terms of both improving communication of issues and ideas and providing much-needed visibility into the change process.
The IBM Rational website contains more specific information about ClearQuest features, including how it does the following:
Provides activity-based change and defect tracking
Manages all types of change requests, including defects, enhancements, issues, and documentation changes, with a flexible workflow process
Enables easy customization of defect and change request fields, processes, user interfaces, queries, charts, and reports
Provides predefined configurations and automatic e-mail notification and submission out of the box
Works with Rational ClearCase to provide a complete SCM solution
Provides “design once, deploy anywhere” capabilities that automatically propagate changes to any client interface (Windows, Linux, UNIX, web)
Offers deep integration with IBM WebSphere Studio, Eclipse, and Microsoft .NET IDEs for instant access to change information
Supports Unified Change Management (UCM) for proven change management process support
Scales easily to support projects regardless of team size, location, or platform
ClearQuest has been included and integrated in the IBM Rational Suite and the IBM Rational Team Unifying Platform for lifecycle change management.
ClearQuest MultiSite, which provides the ability to manage geographically distributed activities, is available separately or as part of Rational ClearCase Change Management Solution Enterprise Edition. Key features of this product include the following:
Enabling of replication of schema repositories and user databases across multiple geographic locations
Saving of time and network resources with efficient transmittal of only incremental changes that appear in Rational ClearQuest project repositories
Automatic resends of information during network failures
Recovery of repositories in the event of system failure
[A.2.2] See the IBM Rational ClearQuest product website for more information.
So, we’ll ask the questions one more time: What is the value proposition for your engineers? What is the value proposition for your testers? What is the value proposition for your CM managers? What is the value proposition for your field reps? And, most importantly, what is the value proposition for your executive team? We’ve discussed what a tool like ClearQuest can do for your company, but how do its features address the questions and concerns of each of these user groups?
Engineers
If your engineering team does not already have some kind of change request toolset in place, it will be more than willing to implement ClearQuest—especially if the members of the team are already using ClearCase. ClearQuest will allow them to better define, respond to, and track change requests coming into the system. On the other hand, developers themselves are notorious for resisting process implementations because they often perceive process as extraneous overhead that drains their productivity. If a development team is required to use ClearQuest without answering basic questions (e.g., Why not use Bugzilla or another open source solution? Why do we need SCM at all?), it will most likely do so grudgingly. In most cases, only after ClearQuest has been shown to improve their productivity over other options will the team members embrace it.
Testers
Testers are a difficult challenge. They are continually under pressure to deliver high-quality applications, with shrinking development and deployment schedules impacting their ability to reflect much on new tools. Add to that geographically distributed organizations, limited resources, and high turnover rates for skilled employees, and you can see how application testing can be a rough place to initiate change. However, faced with the reality of having to do more with less, juggle multiple projects, and manage diverse and distributed project teams, you definitely have the attention of testing management. Many organizations are implementing automated test management tools to help centralize, organize, prioritize, and document their testing efforts, and ClearQuest answers many of their needs.
CM Managers
This is an easy sell, in our estimation. ClearQuest fits right into the IBM Rational software configuration management model and extends the capabilities that CM managers already administer.
Field Reps
[A.2.3] Using ClearQuest’s web or e-mail interface provides technicians, engagement personnel, and other field representatives with a way to feed their input back into the system. In most cases, these people are providing the most relevant data to the development organization, as they are the ones working directly with the customers. They understand the problems being encountered, and they will appreciate a more formal, automated method for inputting change requests. There may be an intermediate step between reps and ClearQuest—such as a formal issue-tracking system—but ultimately the feedback should reach ClearQuest.
Executive Team
Buy-in from management is the key to getting any large organizational initiative approved and, in most companies, to implementing any kind of change that will reach across multiple organizations. One problem with defect-tracking systems is a general lack of perceived value for management: Because the executives don’t see the value in the contributions of such systems, it can be difficult to get them to participate in the process. You need to show CxOs that ClearQuest helps them by:
Accelerating the development cycle by helping them more effectively manage and control change, helping them get products to market faster—thereby giving them a competitive edge in the marketplace
Enabling them to allocate resources more intelligently, by getting real-time project metrics
Enabling their teams to communicate and collaborate better, getting more done in less time
All of these effects impact the bottom line, and this is what is most important to CxOs.
One of the strengths of ClearQuest is the data that comes out of it, from reports and charts to raw metrics, plus the ability to pull the data into some kind of management dashboard. Ultimately, the most important factor for selling to management is the visibility into customer issues. Instead of a screened summary of issues, management can get direct access into real change requests and watch as they are defined, prioritized, and resolved.
There are two other important user groups you should also consider when selling ClearQuest into your organization. Part of the extended product development organization, they serve a vital link to customers and industry—a link critical to keeping your technology on top of the competition.
Help Desk
A variety of issue-tracking tools have been developed specifically for help desks and support organizations, but it’s important to provide help desk managers with access to ClearQuest. At a minimum, you should provide each help desk manager with access, allowing him or her to input change requests coming directly from customers and also ideas and enhancements based on the manager’s constant interactions with users. Preferably, you will automate this process and provide some kind of integration between the help desk systems and ClearQuest to allow for automatic change request generation; this will relieve your help desk managers from all of the double entry.
Product Managers
It’s always amazing to see how disconnected product management can be from the development side of so many businesses. Here are individuals who are central to the planning and development of new directions for your products or software, yet they are too often located away from engineers. In some organizations they do not have access to the wealth of information coming in from testing, the help desk, and the field reps. By including product managers in the loop, you will directly impact the quality of your future products.
What’s the real business purpose for defect tracking, anyway? Why not manage all of your customer and testing team inputs through e-mail, or build some kind of internal portal where it’s all just tracked through spreadsheets or constantly updated PowerPoint presentations?
It’s astounding to what ends a company will go to create a tracking solution instead of going out and buying something off the shelf that addresses that particular pain. It’s also amazing how far people will test the limits of their freeware and stretch the many manual processes supporting their hybrid, homebaked solutions before coming to the conclusion that they need a more robust, versatile solution for their change request needs.
We all recognize that there is a natural progression in the growth and development of a development team and their tools, but what are the leading scenarios to indicate that your team is ready to roll out ClearQuest?
It’s one thing to propose a new tool based on its functionality and cost points. This may sway some managers, but a better approach is to help your executive team understand the various pain points your development, support, and field teams are experiencing, and how a product such as ClearQuest can help alleviate that pain.
The following list is not all-inclusive, but it should provide some identifiable scenarios to help you make your case.
You have recently expanded your development organization by opening a regional office in another country. We live in an increasingly global development community, so multisite development capability has become critical to many companies. We now have to manage around offshore development teams, onshore outsourced components, and the regular occurrence of mergers and acquisitions, layering onto this fun mix of confusion and technology sometimes not-so-complementary products and services. By tracking change requests in a single place, multiple geographical locations can work together very closely to prioritize work, delegate responsibility, and resolve issues that affect multiple product lines.
You spend more time adding features to your homemade solution than you do building and testing your product. Build a proprietary solution, and you will own support, development, and expansion of that solution. Every time your business processes change, a new tool is added, or problems pop up, you will find yourself navigating a vast web of scripts and quickly concocted add-ons to make up for the lack of onboard functionality in your toolset. ClearQuest is a commercial product and has the support, compatibility, and feature set you will need to accomplish your tasks; it will provide your organization with a robust change management solution. Most freeware doesn’t come close to ClearQuest in terms of functionality and integration.
A product manager asks you to prioritize issues based on responses from your key customers. What kind of data can you currently provide to your management team or product development organization? More importantly, can they access your current system and get the information themselves? The power of a total change management solution, which consists of configuration management coupled with defect tracking, is in the decision support capabilities it enables. Product managers envision future products based on input from customers and industry; their ability to capture data trends in defects, enhancement requests, and other input from the field, and from development, is instrumental in their ability to stay ahead of the competition.
You lost three weeks of work because the machine on which you were developing bit the dust. With some freeware tools and with the proprietary solutions, how secure is your data? Has your system been architected to a centralized model, allowing for proper backup?
You need to control the content of your product, and you want to harvest the low-hanging fruit first. ClearQuest includes an integration with software configuration management systems, such as IBM Rational’s ClearCase. These integrations also help project managers control the content that gets into the product releases. By expanding the number of participants in the definition and resolution of change requests to include product management input, you will be able to make more informed decisions about the priority of product features.
Your IT budget was just increased, and it’s “spend it or lose it.” OK, all of us experience this at least once. Departmental funding has grown, and suddenly you’re flush with the cash you need to expand your system capabilities. Where can you get the most bang for your buck? As we tried to illustrate in Chapter 1, money spent on expanding your feedback loops among engineering, the testing team, the product management team, and the customer is money well spent.
Again, these examples don’t include every single scenario for your use of ClearQuest, but they should cover most of your issues and help you make the case to your management team that a product like ClearQuest will help fill a gap in your current change management solution.
He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.[2]
[A.2.4] Rolling out a change request solution and integrating that tool into your overall change management solution is not a task to be taken lightly. Don’t fall into the trap of launching a large process or standards initiative without having a clear understanding of how much time and effort it will actually take. It’s also important to understand the time frame for receiving benefits from the new system and to set expectations appropriately. A full implementation includes installation, refinement of process, fine-tuning of the system, and a lot of user training. Too many efforts fall short because there isn’t a clearly defined owner or evangelist. A successful implementation requires a steady hand and close adherence to company standards.
It’s a fact that most organizations depend on the CM team for information, guidance, and process. Configuration management can play an important role in how your company monitors and improves the quality of your products through process improvement, metrics, and cross-team communication. ClearQuest, as with most change request solutions in general, is unique in how it is viewed by development organizations because it fills a need that runs across many teams, and it also serves as the backbone to communication between company and customer, product management and testing group. That’s a powerful incentive for all organizations within your company to make sure that this product is rolled out successfully.
How do you quantify quality? Well, you can’t (at least in the world of software development). As a consumer, you know quality when you see it. When your head is down and you’re trying to get a product out the door, though, it’s easy to miss unless it’s a company or team best practice. It’s a difficult proposition to sell your management team on a product that improves overall quality when what they want to see is an improvement to the bottom line. However, you can illustrate business value and how ClearQuest fills gaps across the entire company. You can show them the power of developer-centricity and the ability to more easily extend process across geographic boundaries. You can sell them on integration with current business processes and how ClearQuest fits into the overall change management continuum. You can position the increased visibility and decision support capability as a value to management.
And finally, you can show them that ClearQuest helps improve the bottom line. It enables companies to use the resources it has more efficiently, helps team members communicate better—thereby improving their productivity—and helps accelerate time-to-market. All of these factors are excellent business/financial reasons for implementing ClearQuest.