The staff build-up plan defines how many, what kind, and when staff are needed for the entire project. Too many or too few, bringing them on too early or late, employing the wrong mix of expertise or experience - avoiding all these pitfalls with a staff build-up plan will ensure a successfully staffed project. Reviewing proposals for a complex project, such as major software development or support, is a challenging activity. Since labor is the major cost and feasibility determinant for such projects, requiring the submission of a "staff build-up plan" and verifying its realism is crucial in determining whether a proposed project can realistically succeed. In this article for Contract Management Magazine, QSM's Gene Shuman identifies the key components of an effective staff build-up plan.

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QSM is pleased to announce we have recently been selected as one of the 20 Most Promising Productivity Tools Solution Providers by CIO Review. In the last few months, CIO Review has analyzed hundreds of productivity tools solution providers and shortlisted the companies that are at the forefront of tackling challenges in the arena. A distinguished panel comprising of CEOs, CIOs and analysts including CIO Review’s editorial board has selected the final list of Productivity Tools Solution Provider of 2015. In their selection process, they looked at the vendor’s capability to fulfill the need for cost-effective and flexible solutions that add value to the productivity tools landscape.

QSM establishes a productivity baseline for its customers’ projects, identifying immediate opportunities for improvement, while providing the ability to measure the return-on-investment (ROI) once those improvements have been implemented. QSM's Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) tools support better decision making at each stage of the project development lifecycle.

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If you were unable to attend our recent webinar presented by QSM's Andy Berner, a replay is now available.

As companies try to innovate and at the same time keep software development costs in line, balancing the projects you plan with the resources you need becomes a major challenge. Portfolio and resource management systems, such as CA PPM (formerly known as CA Clarity), have many of the ingredients you need to meet that challenge, but a key ingredient is missing: credible resource demand for the projects you plan to do.

Andy Berner shows how QSM SLIM-Estimate’s Top-Down Resource Demand capabilities provide that missing ingredient. He explains how SLIM-Estimate predicts resource needs for your projects and why it provides the best demand estimates for resource planning. He demonstrates how SLIM-Estimate provides demand information in a way that matches your resource planning process, and how integration with SLIM-Estimate enables the successful use of the resource management capabilities of your portfolio management system.

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We're happy to announce the launch of SLIM-Collaborate™ 2.0, the solution formerly known as SLIM-WebServices. The new name better represents how our customers use this "light and lean" version of our trusted software estimation, tracking, and benchmarking suite. 

As technology has become more integrated into every facet of our work and life, the number of stakeholders in software projects has grown. Collaboration among all of these parties is critical in making sure software is designed, developed, and deployed correctly. Not everyone involved needs the detail and power of our SLIM solution, but they all need visibility into project status. SLIM-Collaborate gives that transparency with an easy-to-use interface and dashboards designed with business users in mind. This transparency and involvement of all users improves estimation accuracy and ultimately achieve software project goals on time and on budget.

This update is not just a facelift; we’ve updated more than just the name. The new version includes a number of new features and enhancements that help the entire project management team estimate, implement and track its projects to avoid failure, such as:

QSM is pleased to announce the release of a new book, Understanding Software Estimation, Negotiation, and Demand Management: An Executive Primer. Historically, only 20% of software projects are completed successfully and with software becoming critical to nearly every company and industry, having such a high rate of failure is simply unacceptable anymore. It is for this reason that QSM has compiled this collection of articles that will aid anyone from project managers to CIOs in implementing software estimation, negotiation and demand management methods efficiently to reduce costs.

Larry Putnam, Sr., founder of QSM and a pioneer and top problem solver in the software estimation and measurement field, provides the foreword to the book, which is co-authored by his son and granddaughter, Doug Putnam and Taylor Putnam-Majarian. Combined, the authors bring more than 40 years of experience in software measurement to a range of topics, including:

A foundation of the SLIM philosophy is to know what your team is capable of producing and never promise to deliver more than those finite limits. Leveraging a history of completed project core metrics enables you to quantify your capabilities, and not only provide a defensible basis of estimation, but support statistical analysis for project benchmarking and identifying performance improvement opportunities.

QSM's newest release of SLIM-Suite, version 9.0, provides a number of enhancements to simplify and organize completed project data in SLIM-DataManager and manage data set definitions and queries in SLIM-Metrics. In this webinar, Laura Zuber demonstrates key new features of both products. You will see how providing project size details, master keyword lists, multiple view layouts, and multi-select variable analysis equip you to expand your historical project repository and increase its use.

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Industry expert Phillip Armour highlights the importance of the QSM Software Almanac: 2014 Research Edition in his recent article for Communications of the ACM.

Software projects can be so complicated and so different from each other that predicting whether they will succeed or fail can be as difficult as forecasting the weather or picking winning stocks. Will the project entirely fulfill its goals? Will it deliver some value at a higher cost or later than desired? Or will it just crash and burn leaving the exhausted survivors to lick their wounds, bury the dead bodies, and shred the evidence?

Courageous efforts are being made to collect and codify the data that is available, to try to spot what trends are occurring in the industry, and to provide some useful guidelines for managing the business of software. The recently published QSM Software Almanac, dubbed the "2014 Research Edition," is an example of this.

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While creating estimates is a fundamental step toward improving productivity on software development projects, it is not enough. In "Full-Circle Estimating," recently published on Projects at Work, Doug Putnam and Taylor Putnam-Majarian present a full-circle model that organizations can apply to track actual performance against estimates, reforecast when significant changes occur, and then continually refine the process through post-mortem assessment.

Doug Putnam is co-CEO for Quantitative Software Management (QSM). He has 35 years of experience in the software measurement field and has been instrumental in the development of the SLIM Suite of software estimation and measurement tools. C. Taylor Putnam-Majarian is a consulting analyst at QSM with over seven years of specialized data analysis, testing and research experience. In addition to providing consulting support in software estimation and benchmarking engagements to clients from both the commercial and government sectors, Taylor has authored numerous publications about Agile development, software estimation and process improvement.

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