Products are growing in size, complexity, scope and quality demands. The "need for speed" makes the management of these processes even more complex. Analyzing big data reveals valuable hidden knowledge. We already now live in a world were digital resources are constantly available on-line and on-time. The real-time component of planning refers to the ongoing analysis of digital information related to products, their features, customer expectations, and market trends and information. Decisions relevant for release managers refer to when-to-release, what-to-release (which features to offer and to whom), how to balance between functionality and quality, how to re-plan and how to react on changing requirements. The new system called RTPM (Real-Time Product Management) is an enhancement of an existing proprietary ReleasePlanner™ system. The data needs are satisfied from synchronization with the proprietary issue management system Jira. Case study results show the added value in terms of time savings and better release value.

1. 25/03/2015
Slide: 1
Real-time Product Management

2. 25/03/2015
Slide: 2
Guenther Ruhe
Jason Ho
Expert Decisions Inc.
ruhe@expertdecisions.com

3. 25/03/2015
Slide: 3
www.expertdecisions.com
EDI was founded 2003 as a spin-off company from the University of Calgary
Offers subscription services for tools and processes targeting optimized
product and portfolio management
• Real-time release engineering
• Release planning for SCRUM
• Project portfolio planning
• Quality driven release and iteration planning
• Release planning for management of technical debt
Competitive advantage: Based on a patented technology and cutting-edge
research from the associated SEDS laboratory at University of Calgary.

4. 25/03/2015
Slide: 4
Target audience for the webinar
• Product and project managers for product and service companies
• Executives
• All kind of IT decision-makers
• Business Analysts
Purpose of the webinar
• Understand the need for real-time product and service decisions
• Learn about a monitoring and data-centric approach to support road-
mapping
• Learn about tool support
• Guidance on how to get it started

5. 25/03/2015
Slide: 5
Agenda
• Real-time release management –
What do we mean? (G)
• Current status (G)
• Use cases and tool support (J)
• Summary and take-home (G)
Guenther Ruhe
Jason Ho

6. 25/03/2015
Slide: 6
Why real-time?

7. 25/03/2015
Slide: 7
Why real-time?
• Quality of decisions is depending on quality of data
• Most project parameters change over time
– Technologies
– Market conditions
– Business values
– Users and their preferences
– The product itself and its characteristics
• Quality of data depends on their up-to-date-ness

8. 25/03/2015
Slide: 8
Real-time does not mean short-term …

9. 25/03/2015
Slide: 9
… but keeping an eye on the road-map all the time
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/

10. 25/03/2015
Slide: 10
Our technical vision statement

11. 25/03/2015
Slide: 11
Agenda
• Real-time release management –
What do we mean? (G)
• Current status (G)
• Use cases and tool support (J)
• Summary and take-home (G)

12. 25/03/2015
Slide: 12
Global release management survey
[1] D. West, T. Grant, M. Gerush, and D. D’silva, "Agile development: Mainstream adoption has changed agility“, Forrester Research 2, 2010, pp.41.

13. 25/03/2015
Slide: 13
• More reactive than pro-active
• Emphasis on “doing things right” rather than “doing right
things”
• (Lack of) Transparency of release decisions
• (Lack of) Stakeholder and customer involvement
• Too much focus on just functionality
• Ignorance of resource and dependency considerations
• Decisions done without predicting/knowing its implications
Road-mapping decisions – Current status

14. 25/03/2015
Slide: 14
Ad hoc decision are no longer good enough
Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President and CEO, IBM, 2013:
Responding to change for gaining
competitive advantage in the era of
smart decisions will be based not on
“gut instinct,” but on predictive
analytics.

15. 25/03/2015
Slide: 15
Agenda
• Real-time release management –
What do we mean? (G)
• Current status (G)
• Use cases and tool support (J)
• Summary and take-home (G)

16. 25/03/2015
Slide: 16
Optimized and real-time response to change
• Use case scenario 1:
Speed up delivery
• Use case scenario 2:
Creating value
• Use case scenario 3:
Improve quality

17. 25/03/2015
Slide: 17
• ReleasePlanner™ http://rp2.releaseplanner.com/users/sign_in
• A proprietary product offered in the form of Software as a Service
• US patented technology
• Main functionality:
– Generation of optimized and diversified release plan alternatives
– Maintenance of a feature repository
– Flexible feature and resource modeling capabilities
– Support of active stakeholder involvement
– Pro-active plan analysis capabilities
– Support for interactive scenario planning
• Based on cutting-edge research at lab SEDS
(University of Calgary)
• Applied in 450+ customer and trial projects.
Tool support

18. 25/03/2015
Slide: 18
• Showcase (ReleasePlanner™ 2.0)
– JIRA import - export
– Features dependencies
– Generate candidate plans
– Check resource constraints
– Re-plan for shorter delivery
• Benefits:
– Increase efficiency
– Improve operational planning
– Improve time-to-market
– Accommodate change
Scenario 1: Speed up delivery

19. 25/03/2015
Slide: 19
Innovation through time
19

20. 25/03/2015
Slide: 20
Screenshots

21. 25/03/2015
Slide: 21
Dashboard for management

22. 25/03/2015
Slide: 22
When-to-release planning

23. 25/03/2015
Slide: 23
Generate candidate plans

24. 25/03/2015
Slide: 24
Scenario 2: Creating value
• Values of features are evaluated
and changed in real-time
– Kano analysis of customer
requirements
– Market demands
– Reaction to competitors’ offering
• Involve Big Data
– Analysis of trends and patterns

25. 25/03/2015
Slide: 25
Crowd-sourced evaluation of customer needs
25

26. 25/03/2015
Slide: 26
26
ServiceID Service
S1 Live channel coverage
s2 Multiscreen
S3 Switch display
S4 Aspect ratio change
S5 EPG
S6 Remote control
S7 Support without touch screen
S8 Video on demand
S9 Youtube integration
S10 Source signal selection
S11 Variety of product usage model support
S12 Advertisement
S13 Archive
S14 Search
S15 Intuitive navigation
S16 Detect location
S17 Bookmarking
S18 Categorization
S19 Triple play
S20 Social network accessibility
S21 Playlist
S22 History
S23 Multicast
S24 Different views supportability
S25 Replay
S26 Instant streaming
S27 DRM
S28 Memory management
S29 Player integration
S30 Variety of quality support
S31 Parental control
S32 Channel preview
S33 Picture-in-picture
S34 Peer-to-peer wireless screen casting support
S35 Video recommendation
S36 Share content

27. 25/03/2015
Slide: 27
M O A R I
2 2 1 2 0
{S4,S10,S11,S14,S20,S26,S27}
Value Effort
1570 261
M O A R I
1 1 3 1 3
{S1,S2,S3,S4,S5,S6,S7,S14,S19,S21,
S22,S23,S25,S28,S32}
Value Effort
4506 261
New product innovation

28. 25/03/2015
Slide: 28
28
Re-planning of not implemented features before starting Q2 with updated data from
different customer groups
Re-planning of not implemented features before starting Q3 with updated data from
different customer groups
Re-planning of not implemented features before starting Q4 with updated data from
different customer groups
Optimized response to change

29. 25/03/2015
Slide: 29

30. 25/03/2015
Slide: 30
Scenario 3: Improve quality
• Why?
– Allocate the right resource to the right
functionality at the right time
– Features are inter-dependent
– Conflicting priorities change in real-time
between new features and bug fixes
• How?
– Allocate resource to fix defects
[2] S. Elliot, “DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified”, IDC. 2015.
[3] S. Buchholz, and D. Sisk, “Technical debt reversal, Lowering the IT debt ceiling” in Tech Trends 2014:
Inspiring Disruption, vol. 2. 24., Deloitte University Press, 2014, pp-66-75.

31. 25/03/2015
Slide: 31
Scenario 3: Improve quality
• Showcase (ReleasePlanner™ 2.0)
– Trade-off solutions – Technical debt
– JIRA export - planning
• Benefits:
– Improve and monitor quality [4]
– What-if scenarios playing
[4] M. Felderer, A. Beer, J. Ho, and G. Ruhe, "Industrial evaluation of the
impact of quality-driven release planning", in Proceedings of the 8th
ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering
and Measurement, p. 62. ACM, 2014.

32. 25/03/2015
Slide: 32
Synergy between ReleasePlanner and JIRA
32

33. 25/03/2015
Slide: 33
Screenshots

34. 25/03/2015
Slide: 34
Sync and manage issues from JIRA

35. 25/03/2015
Slide: 35
Sync and manage issues from JIRA

36. 25/03/2015
Slide: 36
Manage advanced dependencies

37. 25/03/2015
Slide: 37
Customize candidate plans

38. 25/03/2015
Slide: 38
Continuous product development and integration
[5] D. Jung, “Microsoft’s DevOps Story Just Got Better”, online document, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dajung/archive/2013/01/24/microsoft-s-devops-
story-just-got-better.aspx , 2013.

39. 25/03/2015
Slide: 39
Agenda
• Real-time release management –
What do we mean? (G)
• Current status (G)
• Use cases and tool support (J)
• Summary and take-home (G)

40. 25/03/2015
Slide: 40
Added value
• Significant impact on business performance
– increase ROI on projects!
• Better alignment with strategic goals and
accommodating operations (DevOps).
• Executing the right project in the right way, and
enhancing the stability of systems.
• More efficient utilization of sparse resources.
• Transparency and traceability of decisions.
• Increase marketabiltiy and satisfaction.
• Easy to perform re-planning.

41. 25/03/2015
Slide: 41
Tool support is available. Ask for a trial!
Continuous evaluation of customer needs
New product innovation
Optimized response to change

42. 25/03/2015
Slide: 42
Contacts and Questions
• Jason Ho
 Email: jasonh@expertdecisions.com
 Phone: +1 587 891 8822
• Guenther Ruhe
 Email: ruhe@expertdecisions.com
 Phone: +1 403 608 1180
• Website: http://www.expertdecisions.com/

43. 25/03/2015
Slide: 43
Questions?