At one of my clients, getting a new partner registered and able to order products and services requires the coordination of multiple groups such as Customer Support, Legal, Tax, Credit, Collections, and Theatre Operations.  Currently, partner data required for tracking the integration process is managed using spreadsheets from these groups and a wiki.  Manual notifications and updating of data causes delays and repetition in the process, produces unreliable or inaccurate data, and poor partner experience.

To reduce costs, improve the process and partner experience, the partner integration team investigated various options from deploying a new database from IT to a customized Microsoft Access database.  After a small pilot with Customer Support Operations, it became obvious that a Salesforce solution was the way to go!  The Salesforce solution provided low development and user subscription costs, easy customization, addressed all the requirements, and can integrate with my client’s partner database, CVENT, and Salesforce application used by Sales and Channels.

Initially, Salesforce will be used as the central repository for partner integration data, email notifications and task workflow, reporting and dashboards.  Integration with other systems such as the partner database comes next.  Then additional Salesforce features such as Chatter (enterprise social media) and workflow approvals can be implemented to further improve the process.  As of this writing, workflow requirements are being finalized with the various groups involved with partner integration.

In summary, the Salesforce implementation for partner integration will:

• Improve team productivity
  • Automate partner tracking
  • Eliminate redundancy and lower errors in data management
  • Reduce number of status meetings
  • Leverage existing applications
• Improve the partner experience
  • Reduce multiple touch points & requests for data
  • Reduce partner set up delays
  • Streamline communications
• Improve revenue acceleration
  • Improve time to bookings
  • Reduce partner set up delays

Most of you understand the importance and benefits of customer surveys.

I conduct customer satisfaction surveys for my clients that include getting feedback and input on product features.  The target survey participants are IT managers and engineers who are using network infrastructure hardware and software.  One has even scheduled a survey every six months.

I provide the survey results on a slide presentation. Here’s a sample where you can view and use the survey questions and charts that present the data graphically:

Per my previous introduction to Product Management Applications, this writeup summarizes IBM Rational Focal Point.

IBM Rational Focal Point - provides a decision support system for market and business driven product, project, and portfolio management.  Features include:

• The ability to create an information hierarchy for product portfolios, products, and requirements.  In Focal Point, these are called workspaces, modules, and elements respectively.  Requirements (elements) are defined with attributes and can be linked together.
• A Focal Point database that contains all the information created and provides role-based access to users
• Besides products and requirements, because of Focal Point’s configurability, modules and elements can be used for other product management information (e.g., competitive information, market segments, etc.) with attributes defined
• Users are allowed “views” to workspaces and are able to provide filters to get to the information needed
• Various display techniques to view information (e.g., Tree, Table, Relational graph, Attribute statistics, Traceability Matrix, Gantt, History, and What’s New)
• Ability to define criteria for prioritizing elements to help decision making, for example which features should go into the next release? What risks are most severe? What competitors constitute
  the largest threat? etc.
• Visualize decision making via stacked bar charts analyzing options based on criteria scenarios
• Business rules to create workflows, do quality control, notify members via email on certain events etc.
• Customizable report generator
• Versioning and baselining so changes to information elements can be tracked (and rolled back if necessary) down to attribute level

IBM Rational Focal Point server is supported on Linux, Unix, and Microsoft Windows.

Click here to view a brief 5 minute demo.

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Click on other product management applications you’re interested in:

• Accept Innovation Management Solutions
• Accompa Requirements Management Tool
• Ryma FeaturePlan and IdeaScope
• Orcanos QPack Application Lifecycle Management

Per my previous introduction to Product Management Applications, this writeup summarizes Orcanos QPack Application Lifecycle Management (ALM).

Orcanos QPack ALM 2.0 - is an application lifecycle management solution covering development lifecycle stages such as marketing and product requirements definition, system specifications creation, development, testing, and delivery.  It consists of the following modules and capabilities:

Market Requirements

• Based on Blackblot’s methodology for Market Requirements definition and traceability, this module allows the product manager to manage marketing data by defining target user profiles, directives, rationales, constraints and sources
• Provides traceability verification between market requirements management and product requirements management, as part of the whole Development Life cycle process
• Coverage of market requirements can be traced through the product requirements definition and on which version, the features definition phase, its testing and quality measurements, design documents, defects reported, and changes over the development lifecycle process

Product Requirements

• Allows user to capture various requirements types, create a basic product structure, define priorities and effort estimations, submitted to an automated and predefined workflow
• Provides content management and release planning capabilities through the development lifecycle using requirements traceability and measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as testing coverage, R&D coverage, defects coverage and much more
• Allows a the system architect to build a product/project software requirements tree based on predefined market requirements to be used as the basic template for all development phases
• Allows the R&D department to add software specifications and development tasks to each requirement
• Allows the QA department to manage the requirements testing process by adding test cases and test execution sets
• Through the Release Management module assign or change requirements between target product versions with ability to add requirements and change requests to a version-independent pool and later add them to a specific version
• Users can track version changes, trace and manage requirement relations, and assess impact of changes

Design, Development and Task Management

• Allows developers to know at any time which activities to carry out in terms of priority and target version, the time frame allocated for these activities, and covering each requirement with design documents
• Provides an automatic notifications module and dynamic workflow that initiates a controlled and easy approval process
• Integrates with various source controls such as Concurrent Versions System (CVS), Perforce and ClearCase
• Provides bidirectional integration with MS Project

Test Management

• Designed for both hardware and software testing
• Allows QA to begin test planning directly from the requirements ensuring traceability
• Provides version changes and defects reporting including graphs
• Allows all test data to be easily reused for future versions and releases
• Manages test parameters to support complex testing environments (e.g., multiple operating systems, browsers, and other internal factors) with each combination of parameters saved in a test instance for later execution of testers
• Provides automatic and manual test execution with test results saved, and can be viewed at any point
• Provides a bug tracking tool that allows users to report defects directly from tests with ability to track from detection to resolution
• Tests can be grouped depending on project needs and tests assigned to a group of testers or single tester
• Query test results by requirements, versions, test cycles and more

QPACK Analytics

• Reports allow managers to view project history, progress of requirements coverage
• Provides tools to track requirements, development coverage, releases with searching, filtering, and alerting regarding the project’s progress
• Release Manager that tracks and monitors all changes in a specific version and provides measurements (e.g., project completion, failure probability) presented in graphical gauges and graphs
• Graph Generator provides an executive dashboard that gives users a quick view of their projects’ current rate, allows for the design development progress trend graphs, and runs quality checks (e.g., defect tracking, open vs. closed defects, test runs, pass vs. failed tests, etc.)

Other key features:

• A central repository allows users to easily share projects, while working in distributed environments
• An Action Items module offers a simple interface that lets the user create, communicate and complete action items, manage meeting summaries, and report results.
• A risk management tool allows users to create risk objects and manage risk properties such as RPN (= Risk Priority Numbers) , Mode of failure, cause of failure, effect of failure and risk reduction.  Each risk can be related to a specific requirement.
• MS-Word integration allows users to create content such as system requirements document, action items, or detailed designs in Microsoft-Word and seamlessly integrate it with the QPack ALM requirements tree.

Click here to view the interactive demo.

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Click on other product management applications you’re interested in:

• Accept Innovation Management Solutions
• Accompa Requirements Management Tool
• Ryma FeaturePlan and IdeaScope
• IBM Rational Focal Point

Per my previous introduction to Product Management Applications, this writeup summarizes the Ryma Technology Solutions.

Ryma Technology Solutions - provides 2 on-demand software applications:  Ryma FeaturePlan and Ryma IdeaScope.

Ryma FeaturePlan

Automates core product management by:

• Providing a central information repository
• Allowing users to capture market data using Market Sensing techniques and best practices along with tools like IdeaScope, as well as capturing and managing problem data
• Giving users capability to make product prioritization & roadmap decisions based on validated market demands and market opportunities
• Being able to run multiple “what if” scenarios, present findings and the corresponding business cases to executive management that’s backed by real customer data, and transparently show trade offs that are being made
• Having built-in requirements traceability so users can see what problems are associated with requirements, which requirements are associated with a product release, and which requirements are dependent to each other in the same or different product release
• Providing analysis and reporting tools to analyze current plans especially when new sets of data are entered that may change the current path.  Reports are customizable.
• Providing portfolio management allowing the user to take data collection and analysis up a level and look at groupings of related products, analyze the portfolio of products in the marketplace and looking at each product on its individual strengths

Click here to view the FeaturePlan online demo, although the text on the screenshots are unreadable.

Ryma IdeaScope

Automates market feedback sourcing by:

• Allowing product managers to design and execute market surveys to support the collection, prioritization and analytics of visionary ideas
• Giving customers a place to submit feedback and ideas any time
• Allowing for anonymous feedback, when appropriate, encourages more honest and critical feedback
• Setting up surveys with point distribution ranking so that customers opinions can be captured as precisely as possible and the most important ideas become obvious as their scores push them top of the list
• Allowing customers to collaborate with each other in an anonymous way allows ideas to be refined and elaborated
• Allowing the product manager to guide the discussions and break up the ideas into subsets so that each set of feedback is quick and easy to answer
• Providing internal reporting on ideas and surveys, letting the submitters of ideas track how their ideas are being rated by the user community at large
• Being able to set user role types called Advisor Role and Participant Role, and create custom user role types as well for whatever classification and weighting the situation requires
• Having collected types of idea and feedback data defined and organized into hierarchical idea categories, and giving custom fields as necessary for capture and filtering that fits any unique situation

Click here to view the IdeaScope online demo.

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Click on other product management applications you’re interested in:

• Accept Innovation Management Solutions
• Accompa Requirements Management Tool
• Orcanos QPack Application Lifecycle Management
• IBM Rational Focal Point