A week in the life of a PM
Last week was crazy balancing between my day job of building the next round of tools and a slew of customer/partner meetings. It was abnormally busy but I wanted to pass on a couple of interesting discussions from the customer/partner meetings.
Coexistence: It was really great to discuss coexistence with different partners and see them get the importance of coexistence in the overall PPCM model(here). We drilled down on the case study by Accenture as a great example of a combination approach of using both a migration for messaging and a co-existence for their applications (case study here) The key that came up in the discussion is not migration vs coexistence but finding the right balance between these two for your environment.
Making the transition decision: I normally do not get involved at this level but it was an interesting discussion. The way the justification model was discussed was simple: [ Business Value] + [ Savings in TCO ] – [ Migration Cost ] > 0 . Regardless of if you go through an actual spreadsheet this simply says that the business needs/savings need to outweigh the cost of a migration. Quick points (A) Different features/tools affect different parts of the model, and you need to consider the right mix of features/tools and how they affect each aspect of your model. (B) TCO Savings (increased productivity, lower admin, better efficiency of resources, etc) and cost of migration are usually quantified with numeric costs. On the other hand Business Value (Increased ability to compete, better access to information, better integration, company’s long-term strategy, etc.) is harder to assign a specific numeric value (although specific features can be identified). This being the case however all areas need to be looked at when making the decision. (Capgemini case study here)
Customer Application Discussion: I had a short discussion with a large/medium customer about their application space. It was good to see the quadrant model in use and for them it made sense. Just from the discussion many of their applications fell into Q1 and Q3 that they could do a straight migration. We also found/discussed several Q4 applications that they considered an initial co-existence model with a possible transition later.
Looking forward to another interesting week...
Erik Ashby
