The Townsend Report

Last week my company held its operations summit to review how we deliver solutions to our customers. We presented best practices and discuss tools, models, and approaches to understanding, designing and implementing software solutions. This discussion made me think back on how the ideals of methodology differ from the reality on the ground. Everyone can agree on the value of having complete, ironclad requirements before development begins, but we all know that this is unrealistic. Among the many ways that requirements fall short is that they are incomplete and inaccurate. Some requirements ultimately are thrown overboard because the cost of implementing them is higher than the business value, and others because they lead to a business process that is too complicated or otherwise unworkable. More recent methodologies such as Agile and SCRUM are more explicit about dealing with uncertainty. Perhaps we need to be more direct in dealing with inadequate requirements, setting a lo

I can't explain why, but over the past few weeks my company InfoStrat has seen increased interest in Dynamics CRM as a tool to help migrate from Lotus Notes to the Microsoft platform. It turns out that many Notes shops have custom Notes apps that don't map easily to SharePoint, and Dynamics CRM fills the gap by allowing rapid development of solutions that rely on structured data. We provided training along with Microsoft to a group of Federal customers who were looking for ways to migrate to the Microsoft platform and also find a tool with which former Notes developers can be productive. Many Notes developers who are not interested in becoming Java or .Net programmers can quickly become proficient with Dynamics CRM because it offers quite a bit of power and flexibility without writing code. Watch for a forthcoming whitepaper on Notes migration on www.infostrat.com as well as a video on this topic.