The Problem
A large multinational organization wants to chart out a roadmap for it's futuristic products with the following prevailing conditions
- It has products belonging to approximately 10 categories.
- It's spread out across 5 countries, each with a country head and many product managers reporting into each of them.
The outcome expected is
- A set of prioritized requirements at the corporate level ???
The company is looking for a solution,
- which helps in feature prioritization.
- where common themes can emerge.
- The local needs are preserved, tracked and incorporated in a country specific product model.
- A whole hierarchy of requirements can be build, starting from country specific requirements at the top and ending with product specific requirements at the bottom.
The solution should possess the following characteristics
- It should support, collaboration across multiple geographic locations.
- It should require minimum customization and user training.
- The solution should have high level of reliability and availability.
- Once configured and basic data provided, it should provide sufficient analysis for decision making.
- It should be scalable; (for example the categories can go upto 30 and countries can go upto 100).
Outline of a solution using RMsis
We will assume that
- there is a coordinator, directly reporting to CEO / VP Products / VP Marketing, as the case may be, who owns and manages this process.
- One cycle is treated as a complete project.
Establish a Project Management Mechanism
- If we are running a manual process, lot of time will be lost in exchanging information through unstructured mails.
- A bare minimum infrastructure is required, where coordinator can communicate the overall plan and keep track of the progress.
- This plan should have global visibility.
- The tasks should clearly correlate with the Requirements at any level.
- Sophistication of the system will depend upon complexity of the project.
Create a Hierarchy of Requirements
- with Corporate Goals at the top
- country specific product features at the bottom
Create individual spaces for all participants
- Where each participant should have an entire hierarchy available under his / her control.
Establish dependencies between Requirements
- Run a bottoms up process, starting at the country level and consolidating into corporate level Requirements ?
Establish a scoring mechanism
- This function is not yet available. We will need to think on this and choose something which is simple and effective ! How about ?
- ( priority + criticality ) * votes
- any other alternative ?
References and Resources
Demonstration
- Demo Link : http://jira-rmsis.optimizory.com/secure/rmsis.jspa
- Project : Product Portfolio Roadmap
- Login details
- Username : demo.user
- Password : demo.user
Feedback
For any suggestions or questions, please send a mail to: solutions@optimizory.com