Singularity 4.0 Ships
At the start of this month we shipped a major version of the Singularity Process Platform. The focus of 4.0 has been on support for Software as a Service, Agile Business Rules, and eDRMS integration (SharePoint and HP TRIM). It’s a busy, exciting and tense time for a Product Manager coming up to a major release. The key responsibility of the job is, after all, to ensure that the company delivers the best possible product at the time, given all the constraints. Singularity is the first company I’ve worked for which has fully embraced agile development as the approach when working with customers and for delivering product releases. I’ve plenty of experience in the past with companies who used iterative approaches, time-boxes, MoSCoW and the like, but it was new and invigorating to go the whole hog (or should that be pig? – agile in-joke, sorry). It works too; not flawless - my mantra is that “you’re always doing it wrong” so the improvement process never ends, but once product management and development ironed out the wrinkles in the mechanisms for managing the user stories and iteration planning, it flowed very smoothly. And we’re now on a quarterly release train – and I’ve always liked release trains because of the way they turn the painful and endless “date versus scope” argument into a much simpler “which train will this feature leave on” discussion.
So did Product Management get it right? Early days, but the SaaS content of the release has been quickly picked up on by the analysts and we’ve had enquiries from several existing and new customers, so it would seem that our belief that SaaS was maturing rapidly, and the economic advantages of a rental model, was well founded. As we anticipated the interest is primarily from companies who wish to build out their own SaaS offerings and appreciate that a SaaS enabled and scalable workflow engine is a key enabler.
The SharePoint and HP TRIM integration is also arousing interest. Microsoft are hugely committed to the success of SharePoint and it’s rapidly becoming the centre of the universe for many businesses. We’re using SharePoint internally as the core of our requirements management and iteration planning process (along with SPP of course) and it just works really well. It’s a great product for collaboration and content management, and the OOTB fit with our Case Management capabilities is a powerful story.
I’ll be talking some more about SharePoint Case Manager (as I would like to call it) in future blogs.
Did we get anything wrong? Well hard to say; I’m personally very pleased with our new business rules and business parameters support, I think the current economic turmoil has underlined how essential it is to be agile, and using rules and parameters to separate policy and external determinants from the business processes gives you that in spades, but the response from customers has been more “that’s nice” rather than “wow”. Maybe it’s a grower.
On the other hand, some smaller features which we hadn’t really played up very much, excited customers more than anticipated. For example the integration with the Outlook Task list - allowing users to view, take and complete activities from within Outlook, resonated very well.
So at this point, while I give the developers 10 out of 10 for the development, I’ll give Product Management 8 or 9 out of 10 for reading the market right.
Back to my user stories now, not long until 4.1.
