Agile Release Planning (Part 1)
Release planning process in an agile team is to facilitate a dialogue between the team and the stakeholders and to answer the question of which functionality the project is likely to deliver by when. A release plan is not a once off document which is created at the start of the project. Rather release planning takes place throughout the project as the project team listens and responds to user feedback. In an agile team the release planning is a more collaborative effort and keeps the process more transparent.
During the release planning process team discusses about which of the three project lever i.e. time, cost or functionality can not be compromised to launch the product successfully. Is the a set window of opportunity for the product in market which makes the launch date mandatory? Or is it the budget which is fixed? Or there is a minimal set of functionality which has to be delivered? From experience on many agile projects it has been learnt that fixing all of these levers is not possible. At least one of these levers has to be flexible. On most of the market focused projects the objective is to make use of a particular market opportunity and often the customer requirements are uncertain. Therefore in these cases projects respond well when time is fixed but functionality is flexible. There are also certain advantages of releasing the product early. It gives an opportunity to product teams to test the product in the market and learn from feedback. The feedback can be used to improve the product during the later phases.
However in certain projects where the functionality is determined (e.g. legacy systems) and has to be fixed the other two levers must be flexible. It is not possible to fix the budget with these type of projects when functionality is fixed because the complexity of the system re-implementation may be unknown. Similarly by fixing the time while the functionality is fixed but complexity is unknown will also be counter-intuitive.
A product’s vision determines the window of opportunity for the product to achieve the desired benefits and therefore should be used to determine the product launch time. By setting the launch date the time is considered as a scarce resource and other variables are adapted to this. However the teams should keep an eye on the product quality as a launch date is not an excuse to compromise on the quality of the product.
In my experience choosing a launch date based on the work in the product backlog is difficult. It forces the team to freeze the requirements and often results in a poor estimate. In fact an estimated launch date based on requirements may be off by as much as 60 – 160% (Cohn 2005). Identifying a launch date and focusing everyone on the window of opportunity will avoid these issues.
Learnings out of Entrepreneurship course
Today I finished a course on Entrepreneurship and Venture Creation at MBS. Over the last 12 weeks there were a lot of opportunities to learn. I worked in a syndicate with very energetic and passionate members and there were quite a few lessons which I learned about this process.
Team Building: This is a very important part of any startup. You need to have a committed and passionate team but at the same time think about experience. All other things equal I will choose team members who have relevant industry and technology experience. It does make a hell lot of difference. No doubt you have to be a good team members but experience is the element which will determine the success of your team. So my first lesson is to identify the right people for your team.
Disagreements: This is part of dealing with any situation where there is no right or wrong answer. Every team member will have his or her own opinion. Key is to realise that disagreements provide an opportunity to think differently. It is also important for team members to express disagreements openly. It is possible that the dissenting team member has a unique observation which others don’t have.
Dealing with Ambiguity: Entrepreneurship is journey fraught with uncertainties and ambiguities. Often you find yourself with situations where there is no right or wrong answer but at the same time you have to make a decision to move forward.
Opportunity Focus: This start with understanding the pain of your customers, talking to them and understanding how to lessen this pain. If you find a solution which can address a pain of a sizeable market then you have got an opportunity in hand.
Ethnographic Research: We used this research technique a lot by talking to our target market and understanding what they wanted. Based upon these discussions we refined our ideas several times.
Overall this course and the way it was structured provided a strong practical learning environment.
Recently quite a few tablets are announced at CES 2011 and most of the predictions are that we will see these tablets in consumer’s hands this year. This reminds me the CES 2011 when everyone was expecting a tablet from Apple and a number of companies announced their own plans for tablets in 2010. Nothing materialised really in 2010 but 2011 is poised to be a different year because of advances of technology and also a viable market for tablets which is currently dominated by Apple. With a keen interest in tablets I want to know how the market will shape up when all these tablets are launched.
I wrote a few months back that why iPad will be a winner regardless of the emerging competition. That prediction was based upon Apple’s first mover advantage, product development theory and brand recognition. Lets see whether Apple can whether this new competition?
More exciting challengers to iPad are Motorola Xoom, Blackberry Playbook and Toshiba Tablet. There are also some more tablets from Samsung, Asus, MSI etc which will be running Windows 7 as well as a HP tablet which will be running on WebOS. Out of these Motorola, Toshiba and Blackberry’s offerings have gathered a lot of positive press. Blackberry has a considerable market in smart phones and with the launch of its app store last year, it has offered its customers a good channel to purchase applications. Motorola and Toshiba will be relying on the strengths of Android and its app store. Google which develops Android is poised to launch version 3.0 (honeycomb) of Android in the first quarter of this year and is also rapidly increasing the capabilities of its app store.
All of these companies has taken a note of Apple’s success in developing an ecosystem of its products and various channels such as app store which has become a key winning factor. This is why Google, Blackberry, Nokia and Microsoft has launched their own app stores for smart phones and are now extending those to tablets.
iPad is at the crucial stage of its life cycle and I believe as the market is ready to be exploded in this segment, iPad has all the chance to move from early adaptors to the mainstream users with the launch of its iPad 2 later this year. I believe iPad will still dominate the market because its designers and developers has the most experience in the market and they will be able to offer the most polished experience to users. No doubt the companies such as Blackberry, Motorola, Toshiba, Microsoft all will be offering very powerful tablets, but the hardware specifications will not be the only factor in success. In order to reach to the mass market beyond techies they need to offer a simple and intuitive experience and that is where I think Apple will dominate.
I think the competition will be fierce in tablet market but that competition will be for the second position and iPad will keep its domination by just adding enough muscles to it iPad and offering more features.
Last week there was an IT innovation day at my workplace where final 4 of the many innovative ideas were displayed by their respective developers. All of these ideas or innovations were technical and capability enhancing in nature. One of the idea was about improving the operational efficiency of the search technology by using a different search indexing tool. The other three ideas were related to introducing new ideas which could provide improved features for consumers and customers of my company’s products.
At the end the first idea was awarded as the best idea by most votes although two of the other ideas came very close. In my opinion the reason the first idea won the innovation challenge was because of its immediate impact on increasing the operational efficiency by reducing the time required to update the databases and by reducing the complexity of the process which resulted in major cost savings of time and resources. While the other three ideas were also very good but the reality was that IT alone could not make them a reality. However it does demonstrate the technical capabilities of the organization.
After this event I was talking to my colleague Steve Halloway who suggested that to make this innovation process really tick, marketing will have to be involved with the technical teams (cross functional teams) so that business can sponsor the good ideas and take them to market. I think Steve is right in his thinking and in order to make innovation work there has to be focused cross functional teams with the right balance of skills to be able to market a new idea. New product development is not an easy job however as research shows that still about more than 70% of new products fail in the market. Therefore these cross functional teams need the right balance of skills in technical knowledge, process, and market knowledge (which includes delivery channels, consumer and customer knowledge, competition etc) and this is not an easy task.
This is why still many departments focus on innovation in their own respective domains which results in operational efficiency which ultimately improves the EBIT or profit margins of the organization but does not really enable the company to increase the pie of the economic benefits (or in simple words diversify and increase the revenue).
I think when companies focus on implementing an innovation culture, they need to articulate clearly their objectives from the innovation process. It should be clear that their innovation process is targeting at increasing the operational efficiency or new product development or both. In my opinion you need different thinking and processes for these two types of innovations.
Asus and MSI has yesterday announced their foray into the emerging tablet market by announcing two tablets each called eeePad and windPad respectively. Each will have one tablet for each Android and Windows 7 where Android based tablet will be 20% cheaper than the Windows 7 based tablet. According to the product manager of MSI, they are convinced that consumers want a product in a sub $500 segment with more computing options.
I was discussing with some friends at MBS about a better model for start-up businesses when this question came up. What is the right size for a start-up? The general agreement after the discussion was that most of the start-ups start small with only handful of people who at the start are called entrepreneurs and later become founders 
This smallness in size is very natural. These start-up businesses are generally based on some idea which the founders conceive and then try to shape up in the form of a business by securing finance (or self finance), setting up relevant operations, building up the right technology to create capacity to get to the customers etc. As the firm’s operations and capabilities grow, the company staff numbers grow accordingly and then the founders realise that they need a dedicated human resource personnel to manage the workforce effectively. In case of most successful businesses whether they are technology oriented or not, the market success of the operation has dictated the firm to grow. It all depends upon whether market needs the value the new company is offering or market is not interested. If market embraces the new offering and customer numbers grow then this is like more oxygen for the firm and firm grows quickly and then comes all the decisions about growing business, maintaining growth, hiring suitable workforce, building the right hierarchy for the various functions of the firm etc.
We all agreed on this when a friend asked another question. Is the same strategy workable for an incumbent firm too, especially if it is trying to open up a new channel to diversify its reach to customers or trying to grow into a new product line? This generated a mix reaction among the group. Some people were in favour of this strategy while other argue that an incumbent company should use its resources to invest some free cash flow to invest in the new ventures.
My answer to this question was that there is not a single right answer to this problem and it depends upon a firm’s intention, target market and its current position and product mix. No two businesses are similar in the sense that if they are similar then they are perhaps dealing in commodities and they are only competing based upon prices. If we exclude such businesses and consider only the businesses which are adding value by creating new technologies or introducing some new business model then these businesses by nature are different from each other. Whether it was B&N in USA entering into online bookselling in order to thwart the threat posed from 150 or some online bookstores (including Amazon) or Sensis in Australia going online for its directories business anticipating a surge in the number of customers, both businesses had different set of challenges and they must had to adapt their strategy accordingly. In case of B&N they threw bucket load of money into creating a good online presence but could not match the technical capability and sophisticated product development capabilities of Amazon which invested much less than B&N. But it also depended upon the business model of the two firms. While Amazon was a tech start-up and therefore did not have any investment in brick and mortar, B&N was a brick and mortar business having more than 700 stores in USA at that time. Similarly business situation was different for Sensis when it went online recognising that the online channel offers value to customers and they will embrace the online search in the coming years. If they did not move quickly or if they moved only when their print business started declining then they would have given too much time for any other start-up to get into their territory and eating their market share.
But the question is still unanswered. Usually the incumbent firm has a brand to protect from any fallout of the new venture while successful ventures are gradually brought back into the parent brand fold. I think in today’s globalised and competitive market it should be part of corporate strategy that how the new investments will be made into new ideas (line extensions, product extensions etc). The key factor determining the success for the new product teams is whether they can stay small while taking advantage of the common resources that the company offers and at the same time don’t bogged down by the traditional beaurocracy.
There was a lot of excitement in technology world about the launch of Nexus One, the Google’s much heralded smart phone device which was launched on 5th of January 2010 just before the start of CES 2010. A great phone on paper, this phone boasts specifications that can easily beat iPhone such as replaceable battery, better camera, faster CPU etc. This phone was developed by Google where the HTC was responsible for engineering and manufacturing the device. It runs Google’s popular Android OS which also has a growing list of applications to neutralize the Apple’s iTunes store. So with all of these developments, is 2010 is the year when Google can give Apple a good competition in the smart phone market and takes away some of the market share from iPhone? No I don’t think so, and there are my reasoning behind this answer.
First it is just a start for Google to enter into the mobile phone market. Just like every market and business the mobile phone market has its own dynamics where support and compatibility among other cool features are important aspects of the consumer requirements. Google either needed to offer this phone through the established telcos or needs to partner with another vendor to make support available to end users closure to the targeted markets. So far the Nexus One is launched in US with offerings in other countries expected later this year. Google has opted for both options as the phone is available through T-Mobile at this time in US on contract as well as available to buy standalone from Google’s website. Looking at the Google forums it seems that many users are frustrated about a lack of support information available to troubleshoot phone issues. A quick search on Google gave me a link to HTC website dedicated for Nexus One users. This site seems to have step by step information about using the phone and its operating system (i.e. Android). A good effort but by no means it can be compared against the maturity of the support and information offered by Apple’s iPhone.
Second reason for my belief is the brand identity. Google has great reputation in software making but most of it’s applications have a minimalist design and remain in beta for much of their product life span. It took several years for Google to get to this position where it is known for making innovating software products. Similarly it will have to consistently and regularly offer better, reliable and innovative phone products if it wants to take on Apple who has built its brand by consistently inventing innovative products and creating new product markets (read iPod, iPhone, iTunes etc). I don’t currently see Google’s brand standing for making good phones and neither I rate HTC as much I rate Apple.
Third and very important reason is the eco-system which Apple has created over years through iPod and iTunes store. These were highly successful products even before the introduction of iPhone. iPhone naturally extended the reach of iTunes to wireless and provided real benefits to end users. iPhone is seamlessly integrated within this eco-system which many companies in recent times have tried to copy but have failed to achieve the same level of success as Apple. Also by keeping a tight control over iPhone applications, Apple makes sure that all applications meet the UI and other criteria set by Apple which translates into a streamlined, expected and smooth experience for iPhone users. Google has developed its own version of app store which is called Android Market. Android market offers more flexibility to software developers as compared to Itunes app store which is tightly controlled by Apple. However loose control also has its own pitfalls such as potential for malware and unidentified security flaws coming into Android applications.
This is why I believe that Nexus One is a good attempt but to compete against iPhone Google needs to tick many more boxes.
Google’s new approach to China
In an announcement on official Google blog site, David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer of Google announced a new approach taken by Google towards conducting business in China. So far Google was playing by the rules set by Chinese government despite a lot of criticism from human rights groups as well as people in the industry who want to see the Internet free from any restrictions. But according to Google the attacks on its servers from Chinese attackers had forced it to withdraw voluntary censorship from google.cn search engine.
Google is a great brand which is built on the principles of free flow of information. This principal was severely compromised when in recent times Google acquesed to Chinese Government’s demands on putting certain restrictions on Internet search. A lot of people who followed the rise of Google felt that was a bad move on part of the world’s highly respected technology company. While now Google is trying to return to its principled stance, they need to be careful not to become a party in the ongoing and upcoming tussle between the world’s two biggest economies namely United States and China. Both of these countries do need each other more than they hate the strategic influence of each other. By unwillingly becoming a part of power politics Google might damage its great brand in this part of the world where public is not very much afraid of the rise of the China. Therefore it’s in the Google’s interests to play the role of a techprenuer which is focused on simplify the world and thus making money.
Last week there were some interesting developments within the Digital platform landscape. Google made its Chrome OS available for the open source community on 19th of November with an official release planned in the second half of 2010.
What is Chrome OS?
Chrome OS is Google’s foray into the emerging paradigm of cloud computing. Cloud computing is a general term for any service which is delivered over the internet as a hosted service. These services can be divided into three categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
Chrome OS which lies within SaaS category is an open source operating system based upon Linux OS to work exclusively for internet based applications with the only objective to make browsing and day to day tasks simpler for users. Because of the simplicity of usage the Google engineers will be able to focus on usability rather than on compatibility. Google has announced that Chrome OS will be available on selected Net-books or Tablets which means less compatibility issues and fewer headaches for engineers. By restricting hardware choices Google will be able to focus on adding functionality to the applications rather than focussing on the ever growing support issues.
With Chrome OS Google is challenging the way people use computers and internet today. With a Net-book or Tablet users will be able to stay online all the time just like a mobile phone. This will be made possible with the wider acceptance of inbuilt SIM cards for mobile network browsing (some vendors are already offering laptops with this feature) as well as general availability of WI-FI networks.
These devices will use Google’s cloud services to store all the data on the Google’s data centres rather than on a hard disk. Apart from the security and privacy issues, this approach eliminates the costs and complexity of evaluating, buying, configuring and managing all the hardware and software needed for various day to day uses.
Although quality of Internet access may be a problem but the past limitations on internet or network speeds are no longer there or soon will disappear. Globally Internet speeds have increased rapidly over the last decade and a growing number of users in developed world use a very fast internet connection. In Australia Telstra is already rolling out 100 mbps broadband speeds to its exchanges and whether or not Telstra is part of NBN the network speeds will increase significantly in next few years. Recognising this global phenomenon, Google wants to change the rules of the game which currently see majority of users around the world use a PC or Mac based computer or laptop for daily use.
More and more people are using Internet for personal, social and business purposes and a large number of interactions are within email, web browsing and social networking usage categories. These users do not need a powerful client to do all this as evident by the growing market demand for Netbooks which were unknown a couple of years ago. Realising this trend Google is trying to create a new market segment within the operating system market which is currently dominated by Microsoft. If successful it can be very lucrative for Google as it does not have a stake in the current market of operating systems. However by changing the rules of the game Google will have a first mover’s advantage and will be able to take a big share of this market segment based upon its brand equity and the ease of use of its offering. Other companies will follow suit but will be playing a catch-up against the innovation and resources of Google.
Google’s desire to capture the Internet market, continuously innovating and introducing new markets is not new. A difficult proposition for competitors but bodes well for the users. Google is forcing everyone to innovate; and innovate at a rapid pace. This fierce competition will give birth to many new products and overall everyone will be better off in the form of the availability of better tools to drive productivity or lower prices or free services.
Microsoft which currently dominates the market for operating systems, office applications and Internet browser is not oblivious of this invasion by Google into its territory. It recognises the potential of this new market (i.e. cloud computing and SaaS) and simplified computing with a simple OS. Just a day before the chrome OS announcement, Microsoft revealed the IE9 beta for developers. This version promises better conformance to standards, responsiveness and more importantly in my point of view ability for developers to directly access the graphics processor capabilities from within the Internet Explorer. Not only this last feature enables the developers to write faster and more sophisticated programs within the IE eco-system, it also provides a possible platform for Microsoft to counter the threat of Chrome OS. By introducing its own Internet Explorer based operating system Microsoft can compete against Google in this market. The cost of not doing that or taking the threat posed by ChromeOS lightly is not an option for Microsoft. In the past it has seen the erosion of its market share in the Internet Browser and Mobile OS markets due to its sleepy approach.
In a recent court hearing http://www.thenews.com.pk/top_story_detail.asp?Id=25148 Pakistan’s supreme court has asked the government of Pakistan to ensure the availability of suger at Rs 38 – 40 per kilo at every corner of Pakistan. As I have discussed in an earlier post, this intervention on behalf of judiciary will not allow the market forces to work properly and the suger market in Pakistan will suffer badly. The suger mills where the ex-factory price is very close to Rs $36 will find it difficult to obtain the suger cane supplies because the growers will not grow suger cane because they can’t get a good price for their produce. Unfortunately our beloved judges of Supreme Court does not know about the market fundamentals. Rather than pressing the government to announce a ceiling on the price of suger, they should have allowed the government of Pakistan to come up with some better solution. This is the responsibility area of administration that what policies they adapt to allow the market to move towards a long term equilibrium price rather than price ceiling or rationing which will be the death of this market in Pakistan. There is a lot Pakistan can learn from Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
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