Company background

Akldevelopment is recognised as one of the foremost international software vendors with its highly strategic customer management product. Founded in the early 1980s in Auckland, Akldevelopment started off as a computer vendor. In 1987, New Zealand was the first in the world to deregulate its energy sector and Akldevelopment quickly seized the opportunity to develop a strategic business application for customer management for companies entering the deregulated market.

Akldevelopment became the domestic market leader for providing customer

relationship management software. This product also provided the company with a great opportunity to enter international markets, as governments worldwide started to

deregulate similar market sectors. The ability to compete extensively in the international marketplace led to the company opening offices in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom.

The substantial growth in the US market led the company to shift its head office there in 2002, close to its major customer base. Continuing product success was dependent upon their ability to interact with clients to discover and understand their requirements, and to deliver innovative products.

The executive management structure of the company is as follows; Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer (leader of the finance department), Chief Technology

Officer (leader of the engineering department), VP Sales and Marketing (leader of sales, marketing and product management teams) and VP Customer Solutions (leader of technical support team) (Figure 7). The Auckland office is their product development centre. When this study began in 2006, Akldevelopment had about 170 employees and nearly eighty percent of them were software engineering personnel.

Figure 7 the executive management structure of Akldevelopment

Akldevelopment has some of the world’s largest corporations as its clients. Its clients have a customer base in the millions. One of its clients was signing up to a thousand new customers per day - thus product scalability was one of their prime quality concerns. At present, Akldevelopment’s product has outgrown the local market requirement (a customer base of only hundreds of thousands) and New Zealand companies are regarded as relatively small users of their product.

Akldevelopment’s product suite enables large corporations to set up automated customer management systems. It is recognised by industry experts to have a competitive advantage in scalability and flexibility with new technologies, ease of integration with legacy systems and speed of implementation.

Akldevelopment works closely with industry leading firms to ensure that they gain recognition as the vendor of the best software product in major international markets. In their list of global partnership networks are IBM and Oracle.

Akldevelopment was placed on the Software 500 in 2002; a list compiled annually by

Chef Executive Officer

Chief Financial Officer

VP Sales and Marketing

VP customer Solution Chief Technology

Officer Sales and Marketing Product Management Finance Department Technical support Unit Software Engineering Unit

records show that it had a revenue growth of 150%, outpacing its major competitors. The industry specialists selected Akldevelopment with three others amongst 50 similar organisations as the leading vendors in the marketplace.

Akldevelopment’s mainstream business is focused on growing their product suite by adding innovative features and increasing its capabilities with emerging technologies to manage extremely large number of customers. Their mainstream business also includes continuous enhancement of product quality in areas such as usability and performance. Their product delivers business value by cutting client costs through reduction in staff training time, increasing staff productivity and improving customer satisfaction.

4.1.2 Product development

With a small development team, Akldevelopment developed and sold its first product to a local company in 1987. The development success was attributed to the company hiring individuals with extremely high technical skills. In 1995, their development team implemented a self-service feature for their product based on internet technologies, making Akldevelopment the first software vendor to make such a feature available with a customer management product. Such success led to substantial growth of its

development capacity. Despite shifting its head office to the United States, the company maintained its production lab in Auckland. In 2002, Akldevelopment had 300

developers based at its Auckland Office, organised into separate development teams. The following comment was made by the company’s Vice-President Development in 2003, for an on-line publication with regard to their engineering talent.

New Zealand is the right place … high calibre of IT people located here. It is their expertise, teamwork, motivation to succeed and global awareness that differentiate us on the world stage. (Vice-President, Development)

As the business grew, Akldevelopment boosted their development capacity. While high calibre engineering talents were sought both locally and from overseas, Akldevelopment had also put a strong focus on recruiting talented IT graduates from New Zealand

universities. The company had established a strong association with one of the leading universities in Auckland since the early 1980s.

Strong technical graduate base within New Zealand … adaptability and coherent and eloquent english communication [skills] … those are advantages to us. Staff are recruited and brought to

the centre from around the world … maintains strong ties with New Zealand educational institutions. (Organisational Development Manager)

Next, some of the key features of Akldevelopment’s past product development environment are described.

4.1.2.1 Specialised-skilled individuals

The earlier development work was guided by the life-cycle development approach. Later, most of their teams opted for the Rational Unified Process (RUP) development method with specialized roles. They had a clear separation of duties amongst the engineering individuals in teams, with the various job titles reflecting the tasks that an individual was responsible for. These roles were project managers, architects, analysts, designers, programmers, technical writers and testers.

We had project managers, architects, analysts, designers, implementers, technical writers and testers … heterogeneous team. (Engineering Manager)

Akldevelopment expected their development teams to speedily react with innovative product features to meet individual client needs. To achieve this, the company not only focused on growing individual technical skills but also emphasized team work; the ability to work with others within the company and external collaborators was very important. Akldevelopment facilitated engineer exposure to new technologies through frequent visits of teams from IBM and Oracle, including the clients. Engineering individuals were also provided with the opportunity to work worldwide with the implementation teams at the client sites. The following comment was made by the founder of the company for an on-line publication.

Leverage innovation and teamwork …retain the development centre in New Zealand where we

can draw on innovation … as we push into new countries, our people can travel and grow with the company … [gain] experience … developing their IT skills. (Akldevelopment Founder)

Some key business roles emerged at Akldevelopment such as sales, support, marketing, and product management. These roles required an in-depth knowledge of their product. Of these three positions, the product manager role became important to the development function. The product manager role at Akldevelopment took responsibility for

identifying the market requirements for current and future products through market research and external stakeholder collaborations, and also for the writing-up of the project specifications.

articles … read papers … spend months out in the field, do things like conference calls, shows and tells. (Product Manger)

4.1.2.2 Large development teams

The development effort at Akldevelopment was organised into project teams. The number of teams had varied over the years. At any given time, Akldevelopment had between six to ten teams working on different projects. Some teams were assigned to customize the product for their clients. At Akldevelopment, the number of individuals in a team was based on the project size. They had large teams with each having a team membership of up to 15 development individuals. Akldevelopment had a pool of engineering managers and they were assigned to lead a development team and the project the team undertook. Mangers made sure that their team’s delivery commitments were met.

Team sizes were between 6 and 15 depending on the project. We didn’t have project managers … called the guys engineering managers … 11 of them. (Engineering Manager)

4.1.2.3 Quality assurance team

Akldevelopment had a separate dedicated quality assurance team for undertaking manual testing to ensure the extremely high quality and completeness of their new product features. The quality assurance team provided certification for the functionality, usability, reliability, performance, and scalability of their products. They made certain that Akldevelopment’s product was compatible with and ran smoothly on a client’s hardware and software platforms. The team raised the quality standards of their

products, enabling Akldevelopment to launch its product into international markets with their specific needs.

There were about 10 testers in the QA team … whole bunch of testing at the end before product release. (Engineering Manager)

4.1.2.4 Documentation team

Similarly, a separate documentation team was established, mostly for the production of technical documentation; it developed manuals and online support for their software product. It was not practical for Akldevelopment to dedicate a technical writer to each development team since the company had a major release every eighteen months. This small team was sufficient to handle all their documentation work. Akldevelopment considered documentation an integral part of their software product that enhanced its overall quality.

Had technical writers … there were about 4 back then, one person full-time and the rest contractors. (Engineering Manager)

4.1.2.5 Development challenges

Akldevelopment’s engineering teams always had some major development challenges. One was to keep up-to-date with regulatory changes in different international

marketplaces; these were the emerging requirements. Any regulatory changes had to be captured as requirements and related features updated immediately. Some of the new regulations were mission-critical having huge legal and moral implications for

Akldevelopment’s clients. The continued distinction of Akldevelopment’s product was dependent upon their capability to identify and implement solutions for all the related regulatory change scenarios.

Keeping up with regulatory change … anything that goes bad, people dying … our systems have coped with that particular scenario … not a new scenario … but they alter the regulations

slightly it has different impacts. (Product Manager)

Another development challenge was providing for product adaptability to deal with emerging technologies. The advances in communication technology provided opportunities for customer management systems to be incorporated with new tools offering higher levels of performance. To maintain its leadership in the marketplace, Akldevelopment needed to provide for product adaptability with emerging tools to create major benefits for its clients.

Making sure you can flexibly deal with communication technology … things like what used to

require you talking to a person can now be done through IVR [Interactive Voice Response]

systems… that’s a very important one. (Product Manager)

With regards to emerging technologies, adopting web services architecture posed another development challenge. This required delivering strategic product capabilities such as features to link the client’s business function with an appropriate third party concern. This kind of product capability enables their clients to access the customer information enabling them to make sound business decisions and to cope well in a modern economy driven by technological advances such as internet banking.

Credit checking customers … know up front if they’ve got to turn someone down … no point signing up someone who is not going to pay the bills … getting that sort of thing early enough

A further development challenge that emerged over time at Akldevelopment was the lack of local customer collaboration on new features. Akldevelopment had mainly off- shore clients (their product became too big for local organisations), the easy access that they previously had with local clients ceased. This had an impact on the engineering team’s ability to acquire a first-hand understanding of the actual needs of the end users. Previously with local clients, the development individuals spent time at the client-site. This involved doing consultation or technical support work to get experiences of the day to day business activities of clients such as how tasks were carried out, knowledge of the different user roles and the ways of thinking associated with each user role. Hence, the engineers understood the needs and priorities of clients much better.

Had New Zealand clients, spent a lot of time with them … changed to having off shore clients, our engineering pool got less exposure to the clients … there is a big gap in comprehension. (Senior Product Analyst)

4.1.2.6 Methodology adoption

Akldevelopment’s development teams had always attempted to adopt an appropriate method that best suited their work and for overcoming the challenges that they frequently encountered. From the team’s perspective, the development method was important since it made their work more visible and transparent, helped to determine the resource requirements at various points during their projects, and enabled them to meet quality standards and productivity requirements.

Methodology has to address … an upcoming release … can tell people exactly what will happen … identify the work that needs to be done, the scope, number of people needed … estimation, who should be participating in which activity … defining roles … identify tools fit …techniques fit … figure out, should we be doing or avoiding certain things. (Engineering Manager)

The method adoption decision was entirely left to the development teams, where senior individuals played a significant role in making the adoption decision. From the

Akldevelopment perspective, the development teams had to deliver against an agreed upon set of features, regardless of the development method being used, and were judged based on delivery and the quality standards of their product.

We choose whatever is suitable for our needs … [if] do not perform, would certainly lose that freedom … as long as we deliver good results, can choose whatever we think is appropriate. (Engineering Manager)

4.1.2.7 Development problems with their method

Akldevelopment felt that their development process had some issues that were impacting product development. Listed below are two of the major ones.

4.1.2.7.1 Unreasonable schedules

With their structured development approach, the project teams were usually not in a position to determine reasonable estimates to negotiate delivery commitments. This was normally experienced by the teams when dealing with customer change requests as they had fixed engineering resources for new projects. Each successful sales deal at

Akldevelopment was subject to major customisation. Often it was based on a fixed price and get out clauses, adding extra pressure on the engineering teams to deliver a

customized product within the agreed timeframe.

Certainly pressures meeting customer demands … each sale there’s multi hundred hours change requests … that itself adds pressure, have to deliver those changes … thousands of hours of costs. (Senior Engineer)

4.1.2.7.2 Undesirable requirement definition process

Another major development problem which Akldevelopment frequently encountered with their structured approach was that it would usually take longer than expected to document the requirements and get them reviewed for development. At

Akldevelopment, it required producing upfront the following documentations prior to any implementation; the user requirements, the functional requirements and the detailed design specifications. In addition, rigid requirement definition and design phases

created issues for incorporating any requests for requirement changes.

More requirements change, harder to implement … often new requirements come up. Spend a lot of time documenting requirements up front … coming up with a solution … then the design, and coding … through all of that there is an awful lot of review in things … all becomes very inflexible. (Product Manager)