In the “real world” software development does not occur in a vacuum. In the risk management exercise you and your group members focused on the development risks that might impact the success of your project. Now it’s time to broaden your view. If your group project were developed in a fortune 500 company as a product, a number of factors would be taken into account to ensure the success of the project. These include the concerns of marketing, sales, support, and upper management.
You work in the software division of a fortune 500 company. The company has developed a checkpoint process for all software development projects. At the outset of a software development project a series of checkpoints are set at key points during development and delivery of the software. At each checkpoint a representative from each of the parties involved in the software development project come together to review the current status of the project, assess any risks that have impacted the project, and make any modifications necessary to the project’s staffing, schedule, or scope of work.
You are going to represent the support team’s concerns during the checkpoint review. Ideally you want upper management to be in the support team’s corner. You want them to understand the current status of the project and the impact the project modifications discussed during the checkpoint would have on the support team’s ability to successfully support the project. During this exercise it is also imperative that you make a compelling argument to upper management of the importance of the following support concerns:
¨ The product being developed is completely new to the support team. In order to successfully handle customer calls on the support team will need some training. Currently the Technical marketing team who is responsible for training is short staffed. The support team wants a commitment to a training date within a week of the release of the product and someone identified to create and deliver the training. Ideally they would like someone from the development team to do the job. This isn’t the normal use of a development team member but the support team believes what better person to help the support team to learn how to troubleshoot a product than a person who developed it.
¨ Several of the new products released by the company have had very poor quality. As a result the support team is suspicious of the quality of the product currently being reviewed in this checkpoint. The support team would like a feature added to the product to aid them in troubleshooting potential customer problems with the product. This may add to the development time of the product but the support team believes the additional time is well worth the cost savings when you look at the reduced time support will need to spend working with each customer who calls with a problem.
¨ The company is currently in the process of developing several new products. As a result the support team is having a tough time coming up to speed on all of the products and their ability to solve customer problems in a timely manner has been reduced. The support team would like upper management to assign a member of the development team to work with support and any customer whose call is designated as critical. They realize this will take the engineer away from development of the next release of the product but see no other alternative to resolving customer issues. Without satisfied customers they could easily return the software for a refund or avoid purchasing our company’s products in the future.
¨ With all of the new products the demands on the support team have increased significantly. The support team would like to hire at least one new person to handle calls in each of the 4 global regions where customers reside. Without proper support customer satisfaction will decrease, they may return the products they have purchase or they may begin to avoid our products in the future.
In addition you should bring up any other issues that you may think of that would affect the successful support of the product being developed.