UNTIL RECENTLY, COLLABORATIVE product development environments made up of best-of-breed development tools have had imperfect integration implementations. In such an environment many tool-to-tool integration bridges are needed to provide seamless, natural automation of an organization's development process, and most of the necessary bridges do not exist. In a nonintegrated automation environment, the organization's needs are poorly addressed and the challenges of project management can be magnified—more and more data is being created, but it is not being properly shared, managed, or controlled.
Project and program managers and their development teams build products that span multiple development phases, multiple tools and a variety of data types. Development teams and managers need best-of-breed tools, but they also need tools that can be integrated into their development environments and can provide them with capabilities that:
Improve the productivity of the entire development process
Allow accountability and predictability of project activities
Improve decision-making through better visibility of the project's artifacts
Supply a cost-effective management platform
Are technology-rich and extensible
Are geographically indifferent to project data sources
Require a short learning curve for team members and stakeholders.
The advent of intranet web technology, with inexpensive and ubiquitous web browsers, has made it possible to create collaborative development environments that allow full integration and linking among all tools used in a development environment. What is now necessary is a web-based framework for the project management of collaborative development efforts.
Frameworks now exist that provide tools for team communication and collaboration, as well as plug-ins that serve project management, systems, and software engineering data. “Virtual portholes”—through the web browser—provide organization and visibility to all project data—especially when authoring seats are not available to everyone that needs access to data. This includes systems, software, and hardware data, as well as project data such as project schedules, V&V data, and human resource information. Web-based frameworks integrate disjointed tool information so that an organization's internal development process can be followed in a natural and seamless manner. Active reference facilities are available, allowing linking and navigation to and from live project data. Finally, frameworks are web-based and browser-driven.
Why the Web? The web is platform independent—in any large organization there are many environments with a mixed collection of platforms, such as Windows 95, Windows/NT, Macintosh, multiple flavors of Unix, and mainframes. There are different authoring tools on each of these platforms. Typically, project stakeholders with a need to see information created on one platform cannot see that information from another platform. For example, a manager or QA engineer sitting on a Windows machine will need to see a CASE drawing created with a tool on a Unix platform. Without the web, that information is usually shared only on paper—it can't be retrieved in real-time on an as-needed basis.
Exhibit 1. The web provides a unifying environment for all the pieces and players in a product development project.
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The web is geographically indifferent—once a corporate or project intranet is set up, geographically distributed project development teams, often comprised of multiple subcontractors, can be working collaboratively 24 hours a day, around the world. For example, a V&V team can now electronically review project data, retrieved in a real-time, as-needed basis, that was created by engineers in another location. Also the manufacturing arm of the organization, which may be in yet another location, can look at engineering specifications and prepare for production much earlier, by getting the information when it is needed.
The web is cost effective—most people involved in project development, from engineers to managers to marketing staff, already have web browsers and access to intranet web server data. Intranet investments have been shown to have paybacks in months [Ian Campbell, “The Intranet: Slashing the Cost of Business,” http://home.netscape.com/comprod/announce/idc/summary.html]. Web browsers are now free (or virtually free). Network computers promise inexpensive client seats.
The web is technically rich and extensible, and is growing more so every day. Standards such as HTML, Java, JavaScript, and XML are being used in feature-rich applications.
Browsers are easy and familiar to use. They can become a common user interface across all platforms and applications. All stakeholders in a project development environment can use a web browser. This is especially important if the browser is the viewing mechanism by which users can see data created by someone else in a proprietary, best-of-breed tool, with its own (proprietary) user interface.
Finally, using the web for project management is an obvious application of appropriate technology. There have been attempts in the past to centralize all the data in an engineering repository. These attempts have failed, primarily because it was impossible to capture such a rich, diverse, and ever-growing set of data into one common place. The web allows applications and data to remain distributed, with central communication and coordination.
Another Point to Windward: Yacht Design Across the Web
Young America, the New York Yacht Club America's Cup Challenge, is the team to beat as we move closer to America's Cup 2000 in Auckland, New Zealand. Their mission: bring the prestigious sailboat racing trophy, now held by New Zealand, back to America. In pursuit of this goal, Young America faces a number of unique challenges. Winning the race is now as much about cutting-edge technology as it is about sailing skills. It means designing, building, and testing state-of-the-art equipment, under extremely tight deadlines, for all parts of the boat—literally from the keel to the top of the mast. For Young America, it also means coordinating the world's finest assemblage of design engineers and project managers, almost none of whom are co-located.
“When we got started, we were sharing technical and scheduling information by unreliable regular and overnight delivery, faxes and e-mail,” said Jack Cowie, vice president of marketing for Young America. “We found that information was not getting shared quickly and reliably enough, and there was a lot of information that didn't lend itself to fax and e-mail.” They needed a way to have designers post updated design information as soon it was available for their collaborators across the country. The testing team needed to feed back test data to the designers in real time so that designers could make changes and prototypes could be turned around in days, not weeks. Schedules, action items, and other internal communication needed to be available to the entire Young America team, and travel costs needed to be reined under control. Young America set out to solve these issues by looking for a web-based, secure Internet environment. The environment needed to use secure Internet technology in order to keep this information out of the competitor team's hands.
Young America turned to the Mesa/Vista collaborative web environment from Mesa Systems Guild to address their needs. It allows them to have a secure project development environment, through which the entire geographically distributed team can share configuration managed data, project schedules, designs, test data, and all project documentation. “Mesa/Vista allows Young America to accomplish far more in far less time, with far greater integration of our design and engineering resources,” continued Cowie. “This will really give us a leg-up on our competition in our race to win the America's Cup.” ■
The very nature of the web, with distributed applications and data, provides a distributed control environment. Using an intranet allows organizations to move “from a central command and control model to a distributed command and control model with central communication and coordination…[used] with a central communication and coordination structure, [an intranet web] is a model for complex systems working toward a common purpose. The intranet/web technologies were developed in this type of structure, and this is the model [that] will become more common with the widespread use of intranets in organizations” [Steven L. Telleen, “Intranet Organization,” http://www.intranetjournal.com/iorg2.html]. Telleen calls this type of structure “purpose-driven” results.
A web-based intranet infrastructure, with distributed applications and data, allows authors to publish their own project data, at the appropriate time and to the appropriate location. Centralized control of project data publishing is no longer required.
Just as important to the publishing of project data is its distribution. “The key characteristic of this [intranet] technology is its ability to shift control of electronic information management from the technology specialists back to the information creators, and control of information flow from the information creators to the information users. If the users have the ability to easily retrieve and view the information when they need it, the information no longer needs to be sent to them just-in-case [they need to see it]. Publishing can be separated from automatic distribution. This applies to forms, reports, standards, meeting minutes, sales support tools, training materials, schedules, and a host of other documents that flood our in-baskets on a regular basis” [Telleen].
Using the web, key knowledge management objectives such as process improvement, audit trail automation, increasing employee capabilities, and leveraging “intellectual capital” can be met. Meeting these objectives provides an organization with important competitive advantages such as the speed at which companies can develop and implement new ideas and the quality of products produced.
A good project management tool “should support the objective of creating a learning environment on the project and be a mechanism for supporting communication both internal to the project team and externally to the end-user community…it should provide support for the core purpose of the project—and not become a project in and of itself” [Daniel Lucia and Donna Fitzgerald, “The Internet and Project Management: Terrific Tool or Terrible Trap?” http://www.newsgrange.org/Toolweb.html]. A web-based collaborative tool environment provides such a mechanism.
Value of a Web-Based Project Management Framework. A web-based project management environment delivers value to its users in many ways:
Significant productivity improvement is achieved through the application of a process that ties together the multiple disciplines that exist in an organization. A process must be automated to be viable. Effective automation requires open and extensible tools that are integrated across all areas of the development life cycle.
A web-based intranet environment allows an organization to define and document their development process, which is then “live” to the project team and its stakeholders. Associations between development phases and tools can be captured, thereby providing a high degree of control and management of the project activities.
As more and more products are developed or maintained, and as the projects increase in complexity, access to the collective knowledge captured in a project becomes more critical to a company's success. An automated webbased environment captures multiple knowledge assets that are available for insight and reuse as companies move forward in time. Leveraging and reusing the collective knowledge accelerates development cycles.
Increased team communication and collaboration is almost automatic using a webbased intranet. Most project teams consist of specialized members of groups that are pulled together to build a product. These groups need to share ideas, actions and project data. An automated web-based environment will capture and share this data for all project team members. Built-in action databases allow problems or tasks to be identified, assigned and communicated to the action stakeholders. As changes to actions and data sources occur, automatic notifications can be sent to all registered stakeholders.
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As a virtual program office, web-based intranets provide meeting databases and discussion threads. Members collaborate in these virtual meetings, discussion threads and in-action databases. The collaborative information is captured and stored for all authorized users to see and for historical logging. For example, all information about meetings (such as attendees, items reviewed, action items generated) is automatically tracked in a web-based project management environment.
One of the biggest problems that an organization faces when making a decision is a lack of knowledge. Conclusions are drawn from incomplete information and assumptions are based on bad data. Information is very often inaccessible and therefore ignored. It is ironic that developers suffer from a lack of knowledge while in the midst of an information explosion.
Through the application of web technology, multiple data types and data repositories are accessible for viewing and searching, enabling improved decision-making. Additionally, associated information can be hyperlinked automatically, thereby allowing users the ability to navigate through threads of relationships.
Over time, more and more information and knowledge is captured in a web's virtual repository. The knowledge base captured in an automated web environment provides an historical perspective into the decision-making process.
COMBINED, THE BENEFITS described above speed up the entire development cycle. Not only are all team members more informed and productive, but stakeholders (i.e., customers, manufacturing, QA) in the development are also aware of the project progress and are better able to plan their resource allocations.
Collaborative technology provides stakeholders visibility, input and monitoring capabilities of the development and deployment process. These provide significant competitive advantages for companies and further streamline the entire acquisition and business processes. ■
Alan Hecht ([email protected]) is vice president of marketing and a founder of Mesa Systems Guild, makers of the Mesa/Vista web-based project management framework. He is also founder and president emeritus of the Rhode Island Software Association.