Product release, testing and holidays
So here we are back from our holidays and I’m thinking about the run into Christmas. I say ‘run’ but I guess the word ‘sprint’ is a better description. In the UK we have had our ‘end of summer’ fling with the long weekend extended by the August Bank Holiday (public holiday) on Monday 28th August. America has the equivalent a week later with Labor Day on the first Monday in September – this year September 4th. After that its ‘pedal to the metal’ as the kids go back to school, business gets back into full swing, everyone is available for meetings and presentations and everyone has an eye on the budget being spent by Christmas.
One thing the Americans usually struggle to understand is how completely business in Europe shuts down over August. Although, not all Europeans go off and sit on a beach in August, it certainly seems like that – especially if you happen to be sitting on a beach in Southern Europe in August! The bottom line is that not much is achieved over the month of August in Europe. There is a slight down turn in people’s available in the USA but its no where nearly as marked.
If Americans struggle to understand certain aspects of European business culture the corollary is also true. Europeans certainly struggle to understand how Americans survive on so few vacation days. The average American company provides 2-3 weeks paid vacation per year. The average in the UK is about 5 weeks paid vacation.
However, CEOs are never fully on vacation. Personally I usually check my email twice daily and always have my mobile phone with me. I am not, however, a Blackberry slave and email is kept where, in my opinion, it belongs – namely, on the laptop. My reason for staying in touch is quite simple – if I know everything is going well and, if there are problems, that people can get in touch (and indeed are expected to get in touch) - then I can relax for the remainder of the time.
Did anything go wrong this summer? Well not really, but I did forget an important lesson which, you would have thought that over the years, I should have learnt! Learnt, that is, not to schedule a product release around the holiday period.
The result? Well, here we are at the end of August trying to get our release of PleaseReview 3.1 out of the door. It was scheduled for 1st September but it is going to be a couple of weeks late. Why? There is a backlog in testing. Let’s face it, testing folk deserve their holiday as well and, in retrospect, scheduling a release for 1st September was pure stupidity on my part.
So we will be a few days late. But do we have a plan ‘B’? You bet we do.
Throughout history project managers have fallen back on ‘incremental delivery’. So we will practise the art of incremental delivery. We know what functionality we will have in the software, we have it in beta, certain clients and partners have had the opportunity to play with it. In short, it holds no surprises and the delay is simply due to the formal testing and release process. Therefore the marketing and announcements associated with the release can all go ahead on the basis that no customers will even start to think about downloading it for several days - especially as many will be away for Labor Day! That gives us the window to be seen to meet our self imposed deadline without actually doing so.
Make no mistake, this is a complex release and we have a considerable amount happening behind the scenes which we are not yet in a position to announce. Thus, in respect of PleaseReview, we have the PleaseTech client (a new client based optional tool which allows the initiation of a review from a Word menu option and from a RH mouse client on any document in Windows). There are some great enhancements to the core PleaseReview application, there are some enhancements to the PDF review plug-in and to the Offline Review Client (both these are only available with the Corporate version) and, in the background, some changes to the system connector architecture. All this must be backwards and forwards compatible. So, as the product grows and additional dimensions are added, the permutations grow exponentially. But, hey, if it was easy everyone would do it!
One thing the Americans usually struggle to understand is how completely business in Europe shuts down over August. Although, not all Europeans go off and sit on a beach in August, it certainly seems like that – especially if you happen to be sitting on a beach in Southern Europe in August! The bottom line is that not much is achieved over the month of August in Europe. There is a slight down turn in people’s available in the USA but its no where nearly as marked.
If Americans struggle to understand certain aspects of European business culture the corollary is also true. Europeans certainly struggle to understand how Americans survive on so few vacation days. The average American company provides 2-3 weeks paid vacation per year. The average in the UK is about 5 weeks paid vacation.
However, CEOs are never fully on vacation. Personally I usually check my email twice daily and always have my mobile phone with me. I am not, however, a Blackberry slave and email is kept where, in my opinion, it belongs – namely, on the laptop. My reason for staying in touch is quite simple – if I know everything is going well and, if there are problems, that people can get in touch (and indeed are expected to get in touch) - then I can relax for the remainder of the time.
Did anything go wrong this summer? Well not really, but I did forget an important lesson which, you would have thought that over the years, I should have learnt! Learnt, that is, not to schedule a product release around the holiday period.
The result? Well, here we are at the end of August trying to get our release of PleaseReview 3.1 out of the door. It was scheduled for 1st September but it is going to be a couple of weeks late. Why? There is a backlog in testing. Let’s face it, testing folk deserve their holiday as well and, in retrospect, scheduling a release for 1st September was pure stupidity on my part.
So we will be a few days late. But do we have a plan ‘B’? You bet we do.
Throughout history project managers have fallen back on ‘incremental delivery’. So we will practise the art of incremental delivery. We know what functionality we will have in the software, we have it in beta, certain clients and partners have had the opportunity to play with it. In short, it holds no surprises and the delay is simply due to the formal testing and release process. Therefore the marketing and announcements associated with the release can all go ahead on the basis that no customers will even start to think about downloading it for several days - especially as many will be away for Labor Day! That gives us the window to be seen to meet our self imposed deadline without actually doing so.
Make no mistake, this is a complex release and we have a considerable amount happening behind the scenes which we are not yet in a position to announce. Thus, in respect of PleaseReview, we have the PleaseTech client (a new client based optional tool which allows the initiation of a review from a Word menu option and from a RH mouse client on any document in Windows). There are some great enhancements to the core PleaseReview application, there are some enhancements to the PDF review plug-in and to the Offline Review Client (both these are only available with the Corporate version) and, in the background, some changes to the system connector architecture. All this must be backwards and forwards compatible. So, as the product grows and additional dimensions are added, the permutations grow exponentially. But, hey, if it was easy everyone would do it!
posted by David Cornwell, PleaseTech Ltd at 3:13 PM
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