Your Business May Depend on Your CMO and CIO Working Together Tue, 2012.09.11
Posted by tevirselrahc in article, governance, ibm, innovation, jazz, organisation, product-management, rational, software, software-development, systems, systems-engineering, telecom, tools, work.comments closed
This is a great article that brings up some issues that can prevent the CMO and CIO from working effectively together and aligning their decisions with the enterprise’s business objectives, instead of their own departments.
Your Business May Depend on Your CMO and CIO Working Together.
This is also an area where IBM Rational can help, in facilitating collaboration between these two, sometimes silo’ed, entities, especially where software and system intensive solutions are at play.
IBM Rational’s tools for product portfolio management can help manage the input from both the CMO and CIO teams to the definition of the products provided by the enterprise. Each division provides its needs, its objectives, and its desired outcomes, and IBM Rational Focal Point can help blend all of this and keep it aligned with the overall division and enterprise business objectives. Each product (or project) can then be evaluated against these business objectives and scheduled accordingly.
Further integration between the product portfolio tools and IBM Rational’s collaborative lifecycle management platform then ensures that the software and system requirements can be traced to the implementation and deployment of the software/systems products.
Yes, this is a simplified view of the whole thing, but it can and has been done in the past!
What to do with “legacy” products? Wed, 2009.07.15
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management.Tags: legacy, product-management, products
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I am now in charge of the product management for a bunch of “legacy” products. You know, those products that are old and, some cases, decrepit, but that our customers just love to keep around. They are comfortable like a well-work pair of jeans or broken-in shoes. But these products are based on old technology and we now have new platforms, enhanced capabilities, new UIs, etc. that should entice our clients to move…but some of them are stubborn.
So what do we do with these products that still bring in revenue (mostly maintenance, but some transactional)? They bring too much revenue for us to simply decide to throw that away (especially in this time of economic upheaval) as we fear those stalwart clients will move to the competition. And our new offerings, although more powerful, are scary in just those additional capabilities!
There are a few things that we have to look at for those products.
- First, to borrow from the medical profession, do no harm. This means that our current clients must feel they are not in a dead end – even though the product itself will not be updated. These users like the product as it is, so we need to work with them to determine why it is still the best tool for them. We need to see if this is a niche that we need (want) to address with an offering, perhaps a modified version of an existing, high capability offering.
- Second, we need to get these clients to move to something that we will want to support and augment in the future. We need to make this transition as painless as possible both from tool migration and from usage perspectives. Note that I states “as painless as possible” as it is often difficult to make this painless. Sometimes the artifacts do not migrate properly between the tools and require manual changes, sometimes the user experience is different. In either case, there will be some pain. From a tool perspective, the goal is to make sure that not information/data is lost in migrating the artifacts and to document the migration caveats. From a usage perspective, we need to document the changes in the way the tools look and in the way standard or common tasks are accomplished. This is where the user-centric design teams are very important. In all cases, we would want to consider services to help these clients including consulting, training, and pre/post-sales support.
- Third, we need to arrange the two previous points so that our development, maintenance, and support costs are minimised. These are legacy products and are typically not expected to be a drain on resources. We also want to be able to move the resources from these products to our strategic offerings (which should be the migration targets!). Although this is not directly related to our clients, we can’t expect them to stay on the old, comfortable applications forever and, at some point, all these resources will have to move.
So how does this translate into actual plans and activities? This is where knowledge of your products and clients comes into play – and this is what I have to figure out for my products! I don’t yet have an answer, especially not a generic one. But I may just come back to this blog to let everyone know…
IBM knows what to do with Telelogic Mon, 2009.01.12
Posted by tevirselrahc in blog, ibm, product-management, software-development, telelogic.comments closed
This SD Times article is a bit old, but yes, we know where we are going with the Telelogic tools. You could say that it has been an interesting process (along the line of the curse)!
Contact your account team if you want to know more as I can’t talk about futures here…
Systems are go! Thu, 2007.12.13
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management, rational, software, systems, Uncategorized, work.comments closed
If there was any doubt about IBM Rational re-insertion in the systems space after the announcement that we intend to acquire Telelogic, these should be put to rest with the announcement made yesterday that New IBM Technologies Help Developers Build Safer Software!
This announcement mentions the new version of Rational Systems Developer, which is now available from Passport Advantage as well as from the support site.
So what is new in RSD 7.0.5? Here’s a quick list:
- Improved rectilinear routing
- Configurable Modeling UI
- Viewpoints let you reduce the UI to only what you need
- Rich text support for documentation, notes and comments
- Modeling Reminders
- “TODOs” for incomplete models
- Diagram building using drag & drop queries
- UML 2.1 support improvements
- Support Information Flow elements (UPDM requirement)
- Deployment Diagram enhancements
- Sequence diagram editing enhancements
- Message and message subset reordering
- Resizable lifelines
- Enable/disable message numbering
- Choose message numbering format
- BIRT-based model reporting
- Model analysis and metrics
- C++ support enhancements – CDT 4.0
- UPDM
Of course, you also need a testing tool in this space and that’s Rational Test RealTime, which is also mentioned in the article. If you do embedded systems development, you should not have to live without it!
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IBM Rational Systems Development – live on external site! Fri, 2007.01.19
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management, systems.comments closed
IBM Rational’s Industrial Systems Solutions we now have a renewed and rejuvenated presence on the external IBM web site!
If you want to see what Rational is doing in this space, I would invite you to go see!
And yes, in the interest of disclosure, I am a product manager for this space…
Drinking from a fire hose…systematically! Thu, 2007.01.11
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management, systems.comments closed
It’s been a while since I last posted… I had indicated earlier that I was to start a new job within IBM Rational in January. Well, I have and since then, it has been like drinking water from a fire hose! Not only do I have to get up to speed with the new job, but it appears customers had a backlog of questions over the holidays!
First, the new job is certainly very interesting as it brings me back into an area for which I am passionate: systems and software development. After a couple of years dealing with governance, I am back in the software development realm! Yes! After a few years of concentrating on the IT market, IBM Rational is now getting back into what was always a more traditional Rational market: “technical” software development. Granted, since IBM is somewhat larger than Rational ever was, the new scope is somewhat larger than what Rational used to do. There is more to industrial systems than just software: mechanical, electrical/electronics, and governance are all issues that we need to deal with in this domain. However, I will be concentrating on the software and governance parts of the equation.
So what does this mean from a practical point of view? First, I will be looking, from a product management point of view, at the IBM Rational tools in this domain. This means Rational Rose Technical Developer (a.k.a., RealTime) and Rational Systems Developer. This also means that I will be looking for feedback on these tools, both in this blog or in the developerWorks forums for RSx1 or real-time and embedded
In my new role, I will also have to deal with customers (clients?). I actually like that part of the work. I like taking my head out of the sand within IBM and to see what our users are actually doing with our tools. This can be a very important tool for a product manager. And I already have my first trip planned for next week.
Now… I wonder if the IBM powers-that-be would let me have an official blog on developerWorks…
- I use “RSx” to denote the new, Eclipse-based, Rational modeling tools: Rational Software Modeler, Rational Systems Developer, and Rational Software Architect
User + Great Product = Passion Fri, 2006.12.29
Posted by tevirselrahc in blogging, product-management, user-centric.comments closed
Passionate users are what anyone would want for their products. They are what causes viral marketing and are a major factor in retention. And the best part is that you typically don’t have to goad them to talk about your product! But how do you get these users?!? The simple answer is “make a great product”! Well, that would be too simple… Making a product is easy, making a product that users will use is difficult, and making a product about which users will be passionate is close to a miracle!
For example, look at all the blogs out there. How many are truly popular blogs? Well, this one is not (yet!). It was very easy to create this blog and there are a few readers, but I do not think it has created a passion just yet. Interestingly, my internal blog at IBM is faring better – but then there are things I can say on the internal blog that would get me fired if I put them here… And what about all those open source applications on SourceForge? What makes one succeed and another one fail?
All that to say that there is a blog that can help open up your eyes about the user experience: Creating Passionate Users. This one has been in my syndication feed for a while, but I have renewed my interest in it since I am getting back into product management – and will therefore be looking for those users who are passionate!
In the interest of research, I will leave you with a question: Have you ever found a product for with you were passionate? If so, what pushed you from content to passionate user?
My present as a Solution Architect Thu, 2006.11.30
Posted by tevirselrahc in governance, ibm, product-management, solution.comments closed
In a previous post, I had mentioned that I had, in the past, been a product manager for IBM. Well, my title is now “Solution Architect”. Sounds fancy, right? It may be interesting to note that, with the size of IBM, I have discovered that there are other “solution architects” out there who do different jobs… So the only talk about is what I do…and then probably not in details.
So, my job is to investigate a particular area/domain and to come up with a way to use out tools in that space. In particular, I am currently looking into the (very broad) domain of governance, risk, and compliance. In this domain, I have to answer the question: How can IBM Rational tools be used to help our customer better plan, define, enable, and measure a software (and systems) development governance infrastructure? Exciting, isn’t it?
So what is governance? Well, back in June, there was an announcement from IBM that defined it as:
- Establishing chains of responsibility, authority and communication to empower people (decision rights)
- Establishing measurement, policy and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out heir roles and responsibilities
I prefer to reduce this definition to:
- Governance is the process of specifying, deploying, and managing decision rights, measures, and controls.
Or even:
- Make sure the right people do the right thing at the right time.
OK…that last one might be oversimplifying things…thereby breaking Einstein’s rule! And of course, software development governance would simply be these definitions applied in a software development organisation.
Now, we have a pretty good idea on how to use our tools in the management of the software development process. The question then becomes, how do we help our customers set up this environment? This is a question that is beyond the scope of this blog entry.
So how is this different from what I used to do as a product manager? Well, I am no longer concentrating on a single product, but on a usage pattern for a set of products. Asides from this, I am still looking at the products (plural this time), creating usage scenarios, and writing requirements.
And in fact, I have not even bothered changing my business cards that describe me as a product manager.
So Kelly, does that meet your needs?
My past as a product manager Tue, 2006.11.28
Posted by tevirselrahc in ibm, product-management, rational.comments closed
This post was moved over from my old blog on Blogger. It was originally posted on 2006.11.08. The links have been updated to reflect the reality of this new blog.
As I mentioned in a previous post separate page, I used to be a product manager at IBM. Actually, I used to be a product manager at Rational before the acquisition and I just kept on going for a while until the job changed. At some point, our job changed from what Rational thought a product manager should to to what IBM expected. At that point, I moved into the solution architect role.
As a product manager, I worked on Rational’s, and IBM’s, modeling tools: Rose, XDE, and the RSx (Rational Software Modeler, Rational Software Architect, and Rational Systems Developer) product lines. Yes, there are some things in these products that can be blamed on me…but I can no longer do anything about it! (Hopefully, this will prevent the hate mail…you can still send fan mail!)
I actually liked doing product management, it allowed me to interact with customer, to get ideas from them as to how the products should evolve, to show them what we foresee as the future. It also allowed me to attend the Rational Software Development Conference (this years was the first one I missed…although I attended the first one as a customer).
So what do I do now as a solution architect? Well, that would be a topic for another post…
