This is to wish all our clients, readers, visitors a very happy Diwali and a prosperous new year ahead. May all of us find peace, prosperity and happiness!
Read more about Diwali
Oct 28, 2008
Oct 20, 2008
Outsourcing
Not a direct software example, but this one does show what people can do with outsourcing.
Read this CNN article to get some useful tips on outsourcing and how one company has pretty much outsourced everything.
Read this CNN article to get some useful tips on outsourcing and how one company has pretty much outsourced everything.
InfoBeans team member of the month
We recognize the efforts of our team members every month through a nomination of team member of the month. Check out the presentation below. Feel free to forward to your friends if they are interested in a career at InfoBeans.
Oct 17, 2008
The InfoBeans engagement life cycle - part 2
This is the second part of this post.
So once we go into the development part of a project, we look to validate what we have done and make sure that the quality is within acceptable limits.
The quality measures and the relative emphasis that we lay on are different for different projects and are really a requirement. For some deliverables, sub second response time is extremely critical, while for others, clients are looking to do a lot of number crunching which again is performance optimization. Yet another aspect is the visual appeal. Some web applications lay a lot of emphasis on visual appeal when the users of that application are say, retail consumers. We fator in these requirements are an early stage of development and that is really what it means when we say that QA is involved in the very beginning of the project lifecycle. We like to have our QA team or at least some representation of it, involved in the development process right from the business understanding phase.
Apart from quality testing the application, we also rely on our QA team to be our consultants. We have found that the QA team is extremely useful as a sounding board of ideas and their feedback on various issues, including usability is important to the project. They also have probably the most holistic view of the application and are quick to identify impacts on areas for any changes. I personaly rely a lot on feedback from such quarters. In complex implementations, such feedback becomes critical.
We also have a keen emphasis on just reducing the number of defects created in the first place by the development team. A lot of testing goes into the development at the time of development. We understand that a single defect increases costs a lot and therefore the most more we rein in the number of bugs in the first place, the better off we all will be. You as a client would be better off with lower number of issues and higher turn around time. We as a vendor will be better off with lower costs, lower developer fatigue and higher margins. A true win-win!
A user acceptance testing phase is something that we bank on a great deal to get the final issues ironed out and make sure that we have met expectations of the user who is actually going to be using the system. Many a times, the folks who think about the app, ones who develop it and the ones who actually use it are different people. And different in many senses of the word. Different in capabilities, knowledge spheres and domains. The UAT phase helps us in making sure we have gotten most of the application right and there aren't any surprises to the end users before the application is released to production.
Releasing to production is not the end of our relationship with our clients. It is the start of a new one. We constantly help our clients monitor the health of the implementation and give support proactively. We understand that our task merely moves to the next phase of the project where we have to provide support to our clients after they have implemented the system, rather than the end of an engagement at that point, like many other vendors like to put it.
This two part series tries to shed some light party on the actual engagement lifecycle and partly on the philosophy with which we try to approach the engagement. Please feel free to post any questions or write to me at siddharth.sethi@infobeans.com
Microsoft includes Drupal in its web installer
Check out this page at Microsoft.
Hmm, we are interested in Microsoft and Drupal and SharePoint. Microsoft is inching closer to embracing more open source. This is one more step.
I am not sure what the strategy is here. Anyone?
Oct 14, 2008
Apple releases new MacBook PRO
Was not too interested in the Apple MacBook PRO release but the coverage is so overwhelming, that I was sucked into the frenzy and saw a few blog posts. Those links ultimately took me to the apple home page that had a link to a video regarding the new features of the laptop.
Apple does a great job of marketing these things, however, this time I am disappointed.
My grudge is against the way Apple is touting the unibody aluminium case. I saw their video and the amount of footage that is devoted to that piece of engineering from a consumer's standpoint is just way too much and actually put me off. Sure, it must be a great piece of engineering but what is the point in talking about is so much in a consumer video? Does not make sense.
Another feature, which I can say without trying it out, is the touchpad button feature. Why is that a big deal? You can click on the touchpad already without it being a button - you can tap it.
Apple has been a great innovator and I like the company for it. I am very big proponent of the iPhone, but this time round, I am disappointed!
Oct 13, 2008
New version of Windows to be called....
So the new version of Windows will be called - hold your breath - Windowsssssssss 7.
Um. Oh. Eh?
Yeah, they are naming it just that. Windows 7. And what a surprise!! Really?
You could argue and complain and all of that, but that is what the name is. What is in a name anyway?
Windows 7 it is and that is what it will be. It does sound a good naming convention for MS who would like to get out more releases sooner.
The InfoBeans engagement life cycle
This post is to explain what the typical InfoBeans project engagement lifecycle looks like.
We are a turn key software solutions provider and typically when we engage with our customers, the idea is to help the client on each and every aspect possible or sensible. We bring that outside perspective to a client's business goals and processes and try to create a better process by integrating business with technology. The illustration above will explain what the engagement patterns look like. Click on the image to get a larger view.
Our services start typically with a business need. Something that a business owner and us together identify as critical or value enhancing to a business owner. The business need could be to create a new process because of a new business angle or to refine, improve upon an existing process (typically to remove pain elements in a business process). This might also involve innovating on a completely new angle (read this business case to see how we have helped one client do that).
Moving on, we have the business analysis and technical evaluation phase. These phases typically involve getting a detailed handle on the problem at hand. Coupling that problem with how IT can help solve the challenge is the goal here. The result of this phase is typically a set of recommendations on process and technology that are derived from the constraints of the problem. And yes, one of the major constraints as always is budget. The second being timeline. :-)
After this phase comes the nitty gritty phase of planning out the solution, creating the timeline and the execution of the solution. We typically follow onshore - offshore hybrid delivery model that results in the maximum efficiency and value to the customer. However flexibility is called for, specially in the earlier stages of the implementation to take care of situations that specifically require either on site or offsite support.
I will skip going into the nitty gritties of the development cycle but would like to mention two important aspects that go on in parallel here. These are often ignored or just taken into the sub concscious.
Knowledge repository and change management.
Building a knowledge repository is something that is overlooked in the daily grind. However, whether we want it or not, we are building up a know how. The resources assigned to the project are gathering knowledge of the project and the business in general everyday they work on the project. At InfoBeans, with help from the client, we are always building up our knowledge repository in a much more formal manner by continuously documenting, tagging and updating our gain in customer business knowhow.
Another aspect is change management. There invariably are always going to be changes in the project during the course of the project. Even when we have a solid and bound requirements document, we will always either miss something out from the requirements or things might just change based on a new discovery of the business process. We are continously trying to manage change by communication, feedback and prioritization of the requirementst that are coming in. Flexibility coupled with robustness to not break anything else is a key aspect of change management. Techrepublic has a good article on this.
In the next part of this article, we will see the other aspects of this engagement cycle. Till then, if you have any comments and questions, please do write them in.
Oct 9, 2008
Interesting question that I posted on linkedin
Read this interesting question that I has posted on linkedin.com some time ago. I reproduce it here as I want people reading this blog, mostly from small and medium business environments to see and respond to what people think about bribing. This is an issue that is core at our hearts and we want to see opinions from all angles.
Oct 8, 2008
Microsoft touchless
OK - so I think it is amazingly cool, but I have not been able to make it work with my hardware.
For the uninitiated, this is something that the geeks at microsoft have come out in the open source world after a long time. Do not remember when was the last time anything like this came out of microsoft.
Check out this super cool technology (I hope this is not a spoof and I hope that it is just me who is dumb).
I tried creating the marker using an orange ball and an actual marker, but to no avail. If someone can help me, it would be really nice. I want to see this thing in action.
Microsoft - you have started rocking - again!
Update - it works - there was a problem in the settings of the marker.
Great job MS guys.
Oct 7, 2008
InfoBeans CMS Capabilities Presentation
InfoBeans has been working with various content management tools like Drupal, SharePoint and DNN, to name a few.
Do refer us to your business associates and friends if you feel that our services can be of help to them.
We have worked with large and small companies and helped them assess, strategize and implement their content management solutions. We have a large team of specialists who work hard to create that cutting edge niche.
I am publishing our full content management practice capabilities presentation here. It is also available at slideshare.com here.
Do refer us to your business associates and friends if you feel that our services can be of help to them.
Also feel free to forward or share this capabilities presentation with them.
Oct 6, 2008
Drupal implementation case study
Drupal has been a key focus area at InfoBeans. We are doing a tremendous amount of Drupal work, specially for the publishing industry.
With some of the posts, I will try to showcase some of our work. These cases are also available on our website at www.infobeans.com and some are shared publicly via slideshare.com (we find it a very cool tool, by the way).
Here is one such implementation that we did using Drupal.
As always, your questions and comments are always welcome.
Siddharth
Oct 1, 2008
Some FAQs
Read our newly posted outsourcing FAQ. You should be able to find some common answers on the whole outsourcing conundrum, with special emphasis on offshoring to India.
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