When it came to prioritizing, planning and managing new versions of software, Excel had reached its limits.
“For setting priorities, we were using Microsoft Excel, but we realized it was not helping us make the right decisions across our portfolio of software products,” said Patrick Pickren, vice president of product management at the boldly named HR provider, Ultimate Software. The company decided to use Accept which offers management tools starting with ideas, then requirements, and idea management, and strategy and portfolio management.
Balancing the needs to large and small customers, an evolving market, and prospects among some of the older HR solutions often part of ERP systems, Ultimate Software product managers needed a way to sort through all the ideas they received, decide where to focus development and then track the work.
Founded in 1990, Ultimate Software now has more than 2,000 customers of varying sizes using its software for recruitment, onboarding, performance management, time and labor management, global workforce insight, salary planning and succession management.
It launches three new releases a year to the cloud. Pickren said the company listens to its customers as it plans revisions and improvements to its products.
“Our customers are a wealth of sources of innovation for us.” However, as Clay Christensen showed in his book, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” simply pleasing your existing customers can lock you into products that serve past, rather than future needs in the marketplace. Ultimate Software also looks at the broad market beyond its existing customers and pays attention to industry analysts as it sets priorities for its development, which typically takes 12 to 24 months.
Jon Gettinger, chief marketing officer at Accept Software, said the software planning product is involved at the very front end of the product cycle, right at the connection between the market and product development.
“We manage the interface between the company’s goals, such as top line revenue growth, bottom line growth, customer satisfaction or competitive advantage -- whatever the company’s goals are.” Accept takes the information hiding in ERP and CRM systems, in spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and provides a platform where users can see all the relevant information at once.
“Then great things start to happen. Companies attain great visibility and their agility increases. We have really automated that function and we provide tremendous analytical tools.”
One goal is to reduce the high failure rate of software development.
About 50 percent of software projects fail to meet expectations in the market, Gettinger added. One example -- HP developed a tablet using Web OS to compete with the iPad, but its product wouldn’t work outside the internal HP systems.
“The ugly secret is that most people running product organizations are doing it by the seat of their pants,” said Gettinger. The typical general manager is tracking bugs and the number of engineers on a product but not necessarily critical capabilities or market requirements.
“Then they ship when the critical bugs are fixed.”
Software development from concept to release is one of the last areas in the enterprise that hasn’t been automated.”
Accept Software has an Accept Ideas component that helps sift through customer requests and internal ideas to set priorities.
“A fantastic way is with the ideas community where customers can create their own idea and share it with the customer community, and customers can vote it up or down or add their input to make it better. That’s helps the community set priorities.” Ultimate Software has about 8,000 community participants from its 2,000 customrs who are sharing ideas.
“If we see a high number of ideas related to one product area we might decide to make more investment there.’
The information helps the developers understand what features are valued so they can focus for the best outcomes.
“Developers love to develop,” said Pickren. “If you don’t know why you are doing something, then you are very likely to go off and so what you are passionate about. Accept helps us understand all the way down to one piece of code how this related to a feature we are tracking in Accept, and how that may be related to other drivers helping us to expand our market opportunities to give us a competitive advantage.”
Accept’s Gettinger said that improved management of software development is necessary to shorten release cycles. One Accept client cut its product cycle from two years to eight months.
Ultimate Software also finds that using Accept helps it meet Daniel Pink’s ideas on mixing autonomy and motivation to help developers be productive and relatively autonomous.
“This helps them understand why we are working on certain processors and then they can be creative and solve the problems.”
Accept is more comprehensive than project management software and focused on software development, added Pickren.
“All product managers are using it as single source of truth in what are our priorities. Before implementing the solution, if you asked on any day in the month what the development teams were working on, you would have to go around, comb through emails and have hallway conversations to understand the answer. It was very challenging. Now they can go into Accept and know exactly what we are working in and why. If something changed and we need to change direction, we can easily course correct and have that flow down to the teams.”
The Accept software works across the separate development groups which helps keep teams in synch, he added.
“We would have silos of work being done. One team could be working on something that would impact another team and wouldn’t find out until much further downstream. Now we are able to meet our plans with a much higher degree of accuracy. We have certain measures of things we have planned to do, and now did we hit those with an extremely high degree of accuracy. One of the reasons for that is we have gotten much better at planning and uncovering those dependencies.”
The development assistance software also provides a continuing link to the community during the development.
When Ultimate Software has decided to incorporate an idea which received a lot of votes into its next release, it can show the development progress in Accept.
“As we have progress done toward that idea, there is high level of visibility internally and externally to our customers. We have embedded a link to the Idea community for our customers. Customers like it, and in 2011 we won an innovation award from Forrester for the collaboration within our community.”
Development efforts get very complex, especially in a large global corporation, said Gettinger. A company could have a product line worth a few hundred million dollars with thousands of customers and hundreds of sales and marketing people.
“You have tons of information coming in about requirements -- saying we should look at this or that. The information flows 24x7 for global companies and it all has to be sorted and organized. At the executive level, you have to have some sort of strategy to steer the giant ship to meet the next business goal.”
If a company wants to move into Japan next year, that effort may be moving through the corporation from the bottom up, starting with resource planning. Does the company have enough resources to add Japan, and if not, where could resources be found.
“It take a tremendous amount of information management, and most companies do it pretty poorly today. Project management focuses on time, resources and schedule,but it doesn’t do a good job on what is important in the organization and how resources map to that.”
Pickren said the engagement with Ultimate Software’s community has been very helpful as the company has attracted users from PeopleSoft, Oracle, ADP and SAP.
“Human capital management (once upon a time simply called HR) has see a high level of innovation and transformation. One has been much broader acceptance of software as a service (SaaS). We want to make sure we are innovating in the right areas. That has been our direction for the last 10 years, but in the last three to five we have seen much broader acceptance as organizations find it easier to move away from on-premise ERP systems for HCM.”
