Fear and uncertainty

Having just gotten back from a 60 mile trek down the Natchez Trace, I'm thankful to be inside a warm office as opposed to the very cool wind of south-central Tennessee.  That being said, things are not all rosy here either.  I had my first employee inquiry today on the stability of his job in light of the latest round of nebulous rumors.  Reading the techcrunch blog I see a number of large and small tech co's have been letting people go - most notably Yahoo.  Locally ACIPCO is laying off 50+ people, ACIPCO is a very paternal orgainzation that doesn't do this very often.  It'll be interesting to see if we are asked to make further cuts, given the slashes we have already made this year it would seem unlikely that development would be hit further - unless our business model is drastically changed.

Do Large Companies Stifle Innovation?

It is an often asked question, and while the answer is not universal, it often is a resounding "yes!" I know there are innovative large companies out there, some are young (Google), some aren't so young (HP).  It is a challenge to innovate where I work, it is going against the grain.  My latest saga involves our attempt to create a web 2.0 style interface.  I started by pursuing an in-house graphic artist's time.  She works for another division so that was fruitless, she did give me a corporate reference to follow-up with.  When I emailed our marketing group about utilizing the corporate designer I received a response from the VP that all interfaces must follow the corporate standard color scheme and layout, which is about as innovative and flexible as a VCR player.  So what to do, hire a free lance designer or give up and live with an ugly interface?  After losing so many battles over this type of thing it's easy to lose the will to fight - especially when fighting for change and innovation is so strongly opposed by so many.  

IAOP certification and outsourcing slowing

I've begun mapping my experience to categories to gain the points needed for 1 area of my IAOP certification.  IAOP is the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals, the certification program is called COP - Certified Outsourcing Professional.  There are three main parts for me to gain the certification - 

1) Graduate degree completion ~50pts

2) Project experience mappings ~50pts

3) IAOP course work ~50pts

150 points are needed to receive the certification.  I don't have the impression it's a widely known certification at this point, however the demand will probably be growing.  In fact, I just read an article in Business Week referencing the outsourcing downturn in India due to the downturn in the worldwide economy.  The forecast over the next few years specifically mentioned Financial Services firms would likely hike the % of Outsourcing used to help reduce costs in tight economic times.  Sounds like more opportunity for COPs to me.

Thoughts on requirements managment software

Most development organizations in my experience follow a pretty simplistic method for documenting requirements (e.g. Microsoft Word).  In my group we have attempted to go to an even simpler tool for our BRD type docs - the Confluence wiki.  Detailed test level requirements are distinct from the higher level BRD though.  What generates this pondering?  Today I attended a session presented by CTS and Blueprint.  Blueprint is a software vendor that provides a very robust software requirements tool.  The tool includes some level of prototyping, wow though at the level of requirements involved in using this tool.  

Our group here follows an agile approach to development which often does not allow time to generate the best requirements.  This definitely has caused us problems with increased defects and difficulty defining proper behavior for our global QA team.  Recently we have added requirements phases into our development life cycle, specifically the BRD and TAD pieces.  I think this is the first step to moving into more regimented requirement documentation guidelines - however we will require one of two things to pursue the level of requirements embraced by organizations such as Blueprint:

1. More staff for reqs writing
2. Reduced development and time to market requirments to allow small staff time to develop reqs docs

With current economic conditions, option 1 is unlikely.  Option 2 isn't particularly appealing either for an organization trying to drive new product development and new revenue streams...

Pune Express

Well I've been so delinquent in posting that a number of things have happened since the last post, all of which I cannot recollect.  At least one of those items was my initiating the Certified Outsourcing Professional process for myself.  This is offered by the IAOP and I have 18 months to complete it from the time that I initiated the application.  My company reimburst the $600 application fee, so now I just have to do some work... the main two items to be done are attend their 4 day class and to complete my MBA.  Once those two items are done I will have sufficient credits to receive the certification.

Our globalized development team continues to move along smoothly.  The three different segments all continue to perform well - and we have added staff to each.  In some cases we made swaps with other teams, in others we have augmented the teams.  It's remarkable how easy it is to augment the groups once a basic structure is in place - getting the personnel framework up and going is the biggest challenge in my experience with outsourcing.