Ramkumar Ramachandran presented a strategy for product development with the vision of creating a mature product line to address industry needs with minimal customization. The objectives are to thoroughly understand customer needs, incorporate features controlled, do gap analysis, and maintain help desk support. The process involves product readiness, identification, enrichment, training, implementation including development, certification, help desk support and patch management to control customization efforts and ensure product maturity. A task force is recommended to create, train on and implement this new product development process then monitor and refine it.

1. Strategy for Product
Development
Presentation by Ramkumar Ramachandran

2. Vision Statement
 To create a product line that is matured
enough to address all the industry needs
and could be deployed with minimal
customization

3. Business Objective
 Understand the industry’s needs
thoroughly
 Incorporate the features in the product in
a controlled fashion
 Do a strong gap analysis
 Have minimal customization
 Maintain an effective help desk

4. Technical Objective
 Have a strong SCCB
 Create good amount of RUSAs
 Create a ‘highly configurable’ product
 Create an effective ‘patch management’
system
 Maintain ‘clean code’

5. Today’s Situation
 Where is the product?
 Where is the base source?
 Where is the base requirements?
 What is the product maturity?
 Which is the ‘right source’?

6. How Did We Get Here?
 Products are projects
 Base product defects + Customization defects
 Cloned source Vs. Referred source
 Understanding of product features by Pre-Sales
 Aggressive timelines due to over commitments
 Person committing and person delivering are
different

7. Process for productizing
 Product Readiness Stage
 Product Identification
 Product enrichment before launch
 SCCB formation
 Base product certification
 Internal product training for Pre-Sales
 Intra product team training

8. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Pre-Sales activities
 Identifying customers
 On-field gap study – only after being ‘trained’
 Contract finalization based on OGS

9. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Specific Implementation
 Detailed Gap Analysis in SpecImp
 DGA within the framework of OGS
 Conflict resolution OGS Vs. DGA
 Branch identification
 Requirements & Relation Management
Base module
SpecImp need

10. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Development activities
 Development branch
 Strong SCCB for base source release
 Proper change intimation on RUSAs
 RUSA identification to be encouraged
 STM = Req.  Test Cases  Source  Build
Base module
Customization

11. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Certification
 Defects routing
 Defects tracking
 Defects deferring
 Defects bouncing
 Known defects publishing for every release
 On-the-fly bug-fixing for base source - Ideal
Base module
Customization

12. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Product Implementation Plan
 Environment study
 Infrastructure upgrade – if needed
 End user training
 Dry / Parallel run
 User Acceptance
 On field defect handling / tracking

13. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Implementation signoff
 Customer signoff
 Customer satisfaction measurement
 Defined warranty period

14. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Product Help Desk
 Help Desk  Domain / Product specialists
 Paid support / Warranty Support
 Defects simulation & classification
 Defects reporting to Certification team
 Defects tracking by Certification team

15. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Patch Release Management
 Generic Patch release for all implementations
 Specific Patch for SpecImp customization
 Patches to be product-version-aware

16. Process for productizing (contd.)
 Numbers to be controlled
 Variance between OGS and DGA
 Customization Effort Vs. Base product effort
 RUSA size Vs. Customization size
 TimeToGoLive
 Patches released for a period
 Product Maturity Index

17. Recommendation
 Task force formation
 Process Creation
 Process training
 Process implementation
 Results monitoring
 Fine tune process

18. Thank You…!