| Uplift versus Upgrade: There is often confusion about the difference between an uplift and an upgrade. The primary difference is that an upgrade is performed to add new business capability, while an uplift is performed to maintain current capability in the face of a changing virtual machine stack. Upgrades normally apply to business application software, uplifts normally apply to infrastructure software (DBMS, operating system, browser, message broker, etc.). Uplifts are performed on a Reference Architecture (RA), which is a vendor product and major version pair. So an uplift might involve moving an application from Internet Explorer 8 (RA.IE8) to Internet Explorer 9 (RA.IE9). |
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ExcelerPlan is now available to government customers under our GSA Schedule 70. For details and GSA pricing, email edward@portal.level4ventures.com.
Level 4 was awarded an estimation related contract with the California Department of Child Support, and our GSA OASIS governance support contract was extended. |
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All times are Pacific Time!
Free WebEx
Estimating with ExcelerPlan
12/4, 11 AM-12:30 PST
12/18, 11 AM-12:30 PST
1/8, 11 AM-12:30 PST
1/22, 11 AM-12:30 PST
2/5, 11 AM-12:30 PST
To register for demos, email:
Edward@portal.level4ventures.com |
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Free Training with Site License
Purchase any ExcelerPlan site license between now and December 31st and receive 10 seats for our self-paced video training program (a $19,995 value), plus a 2 hour live question and answer session with William Roetzheim.
To obtain site license pricing email:
Edward@portal.level4ventures.com |
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| I’m excited to announce that ExcelerPlan is now available on Level 4’s GSA Schedule 70 for both named user and site licenses. We believe that this contract vehicle will significantly simply the process of purchasing ExcelerPlan for our government customers.
Edward
Director of Sales and Marketing
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| Ten user self-paced training package free with the purchase of a site license during November, plus a bonus 2 hour live Q&A with William Roetzheim. |
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 Four Steps to Technology Optimization: Four interlinked process areas are necessary to achieve technology optimization. The first is a process for defining good high-level requirements. Good high-level requirements are identified early in the project life, define the project in terms of deliverable products that are meaningful to the business, and that are traceable to the end of the project. Good high-level requirements also serve as good size inputs into an estimation process, which is our second necessary process area. The estimation process ensures that the project budget includes adequate resources and time for successful execution while maintaining high quality, and also helps provide information needed to ensure that the right projects go forward. Good high-level requirements and good estimates result in a project that can be successful. They do not result in a project that must be successful. For the project to be successful, you still need good project management. But for technology optimization, you specifically need strong scope management. Scope management is how we ensure that the planned resources and time remain adequate, and guarantees that at the end of the project we know exactly what we’ve really built. The final process step required for IT optimization is benchmarking and a will to optimize. Benchmarking (both internal and external) is used to identify potential areas of optimization, but they won’t help unless the organization has the will to optimize. This will to optimize shows up in the form of specific, quantitative targets for improvement.
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So in summary, successful IT optimization requires a will to optimize supported by benchmarking to identify targets for optimization; which requires scope management to have a stable and known quantity of delivered functionality; which requires estimation to ensure that the scope is correctly defined and adequate resources and time is available to deliver; which requires requirements that are tied to delivered business functionality.
Next month we’ll discuss areas of optimization.
William@portal.level4ventures.com
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Estimation Expert System, Pros and Cons: ExcelerPlan version 7 (currently in beta, shipping on 1 January) includes an expert system wizard (ExcelerCost) to support the estimation process. The Wizard begins with an interview process to gather information about your project, and uses this to identify areas that should be estimated. Examples of areas would be data conversion, infrastructure hardware, COTS software configuration, or developing an interface. It then uses this information to gather additional information specific to this project, and finally populates your estimate input data for you. You would then review and if necessary modify the input data, then review the results.
This expert system approach offers both advantages and disadvantages. On the advantage side, it decreases the learning curve for new estimators; it helps to ensure that you don’t forget a component of the work; and it increases standardization in the estimation process. On the disadvantage side, it will explore a lot of areas that don’t apply to a simple project; it will make simplifying assumptions about the project that may or may not be valid; and it may allow new estimators to skip past several learning process stages, limiting the ability of those estimators to review and modify the generated estimate.
Next month we’ll discuss the ExcelerCost wizard in more detail.
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[This guest column reprinted with permission from: “MINIMIZING THE RISK OF LITIGATION: PROBLEMS NOTED IN BREACH OF CONTRACT LITIGATION,” Capers Jones, July 2014. Full article available on http://Namcookanalytics.com]
For the purposes of this article, software “failures” are defined as software projects which met any of these attributes:
- Termination of the project due to cost or schedule overruns.
- Schedule or cost overruns in excess of 50% of initial estimates
- Applications which, upon deployment, fail to operate safely.
- Law suits brought by clients for contractual non-compliance.
Although there are many factors associated with schedule delays and project cancellations, the failures that end up in court always seem to have six major deficiencies:
- Accurate estimates were either not prepared or were rejected.
- Accurate estimates were not supported by objective benchmarks
- Change control was not handled effectively.
- Quality control was inadequate.
- Progress tracking did not reveal the true status of the project.
- The contracts omitted key topics such as quality and out of scope changes
Readers are urged to discuss outsource agreements with their attorneys. This paper is based on observations of actual cases, but the author is not an attorney and the paper is not legal advice. It is advice about how software projects might be improved to lower the odds of litigation occurring.
Next month I’ll begin discussing each of these in turn.
Capers Jones
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 Dear Tabby:
My boyfriend likes to shop. I’m mean, if he had his way he’d spend all of time doing IT acquisition. Acquisition, acquisition, acquisition! I think he needs to spend less time and money doing acquisition, but he thinks he’s normal. So my question is, when it comes to IT acquisition, exactly what is normal?
signed, Sick of RFPs Rebecca
Dear Sick of RFPs:
Acquisitions can be large projects in and of themselves, with multi-million dollar budgets and multi-year schedules. For this reason, it’s possible to do cost modeling to discover cost estimating relationships (CERs), adjusting factors, and so on. I’ve looked at 49 IT acquisitions and with further analysis found that effort could be modeled using a power function based on acquisition size in function point equivalents (FPEs) (roughly 5.2 * FPE**.9), and duration could be modeled using a power function on acquisition effort. These models improve on early acquisition models using acquisition size in dollars. They are available as a free, optional add-in for ExcelerPlan. This same study identified the statistically relevant adjusting variables, and as discussed in a previous issue (Tips and Tricks), these are acquisition type (new, replace, upgrade); diversity of stakeholders; funding source (state, federal, mixed, benefit); and procurement approach (single step or multi-step).
signed, Tabby
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M&O Costs: An often overlooked or underestimated project expense is project related Maintenance and Operations (M&O) costs. Most people think of M&O costs as starting when the project is complete. But the reality is that those costs typically phase-in during the project execution, and the project budget must normally cover the costs through project completion and product acceptance. One obvious example is a warranty period that is included in the project budget. But other examples include manufacturer’s warranty costs for infrastructure that kick in during the project life, operations costs that start up as the systems are deployed during testing, and help desk costs that start during a phased deployment. In ExcelerPlan you identify these costs either as a fixed number of months (e.g., 4 months of warranty), or as a fixed percentage of the project duration (e.g., 25% of the project duration).
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