April Edition 

This morning I was coming into work over the mountains from town. As we came over the crest to go down to our office, I noticed again the classic vista we enjoy seeing every day. Northeast of Morelia, toward Cuitzeo, in the morning we see a hazy range of tan and green hills and valleys spreading out as far as you can see. It’s nice to be able to start the day with that picture in your mind.  

I’ve been heads down, getting ready for our workshop in May and working on our services so we can continue to scale to meet a growing demand. Considering operational and production issues is always complex. Production in a service business is both comparable and different from a classic manufacturing environment. As your services grow, you begin to evolve more towards repeatable processes, metrics, and a higher level of operational efficiency. That is – if you want to grow successfully.  

That is certainly part of the message Jim Geisman and I will be delivering to our workshop attendees in San Francisco. Planning a successful SaaS product requires as much thinking about the operational side as it does technical issues. But, it shouldn’t be so complex you can’t find your way through the choices. You should be able to see it as a roadmap – a path you can travel as you go towards your goal. Just like I do every morning, you should be able to see the horizon you are moving towards even if the road takes many turns on the way. That’s what we’re going to be bringing to our audience – the business and technical road map that can help you make the choices that will get you where you want to go.  

I’m looking forward to it! I hope you will be able to join us.    

Haut Tech: SaaS Insights from Scio Consulting

SaaS: Develop, Price, Operate and Succeed  

Honestly, this is less of an article than it is a promotion of our workshop May 13th in San Francisco with Jim Geisman of Software Pricing Partners. Both of us have given workshops separately before, but this is the first time we’ve put our expertise together in one program. It gives us an opportunity to address the business and technical choices SaaS vendors need to consider as a coordinated strategy – not as separate issues. From our experience, that’s an important distinction. As far as we know, this is the first time anyone has provided a one-day workshop that addresses cash flow, operations and product development strategy.  

To make it even more enticing, we’ve intentionally set the date for the workshop right after the Opsource and SIIA SaaS Summit: All About the Cloud conference, May 10-12 in San Francisco. That gives our participants to both events in the same week. We’ve also made it very convenient. Our venue will be the Donatello Hotel, just around the corner from the Westin St Francis where the SaaS Summit is being held. 

I won’t repeat the topics and issues we’re addressing in this newsletter. You can find those on our blog. What I will say is that Jim and I have a great rapport and we plan to keep this an interactive, dynamic day of discussion. We want to bring a point of view that will help unify your decisions and make it easier to navigate because you understand the business impact of your choices. And we want to do it in a way that is fun and relevant to your situation. Sitting in a room all day being “talked at” isn’t our idea of a good experience. If you agree, I’m sure you will find this workshop valuable.  

We do have some special price available for those who sign up now or as a team. We also have a special price for the Donatello Hotel you can use for both the SaaS Summit and the workshop. And, you can get $100 off the price for the Summit by using our promo code: PRMSCIO. Taken all together, the discounts will more than cover the cost of the workshop.  

So please, take a look at our blog and let me know if you have any questions (408-404-3897 ext 603). And please, sign up on Acteva.

The 5 Variables of Project Estimation  

When I wrote this article, it was one of those you ask yourself about. How many people are going to read a discussion of software project estimation? I was pleasantly surprised with the reaction. It has gotten a lot of attention and readers.  

For me it was an outgrowth of work I was doing to improve our own processes. Articles like this always come across better when they come from issues you are working on rather than theory. My thought at the time was, “Well, our customers consider the same issues when they plan a software product, so it fits.”  

So, if you struggle with software project estimation you should give this article a look. I tried to do more than just identify the variables – I tried to give insight into why when you set more than one of the variables as a target, you can get less than satisfactory results.

SaaS: Irrational Fear of Platforms 

With the workshop coming, my writing output climbed this month. I really didn’t expect to be covering three articles in the newsletter. But this was one that came to me as a reaction from articles I kept tripping across as I followed recent news on SaaS.  

I really do feel the analysts that write about SaaS and PaaS have a limited understanding of how software development has gotten to this stage. We leverage languages, platforms, frameworks – all sorts of abstractions – to develop products faster and more reliably. If we didn’t, we would lose the ability to write for multiple platforms, processors, environments, etc. Every variation would require a separate implementation or we have to strictly limit configurations and hamper product diversity.  

So, when I hear people worrying endlessly about “lock-in” and other analyst created phrases I wonder where they have been all this time. We’ve always faced these issues. The evaluation and risk mitigation required is well understood at an industry level. But still, I realize those of us with the experience and understanding need to share with those blind-sided by critics who don’t offer logical alternatives. This is the idea behind this article. If you have critics on your team, particularly from the business side, this is a good article to pass them.  

So – for those of you that can join us – see you next month in San Francisco. Otherwise, I’ll see you ‘round the net…