I have just spent 3 very instructive weeks in Vietnam touching our cloud projects. I had the chance to assess the project development process right from within the project. My expectations were confirmed, it is indeed a good team: motivated, involved and dedicated to the Virtual Fanatic cause. The time is still running short for the January release of Cloud@VirtualFanatic.

Next, I held Cloud seminars at the Institut de la Francophonie pour l’Informatique (Francophonie Institute for Computer Science) and at the PFIEV (Programme de Formation d’Ingénieurs d’Excellence au Vietnam – a Vietnamese training programme for excellence in engineering). I had already participated in trainings at these universities and it is always a real pleasure to have direct contact with the students. I focused my training on presenting cloud related concepts, the vision of Virtual Fanatic and I finished with the likely consequences of cloud on the developers’ business. The presentation on cloud is available here (in French only).

I can say that they are eager to hear about cloud. I have been bombarded with questions on the SaaS model, the consequences on facilities management, the free cloud models,…

As Pentalog (IT outsourcing company) has started a business activity in South-East Asia, I took this chance to meet the main local players in the IT industry. I can say I identified a desire to create new types of services for Vietnamese companies for which technical and commercial models as well as the services are not ready yet. But they know how to progress fast.

For my friends, I managed to taste an ant egg salad, sauteed worms as big as my thumb and even fried bugs (photos are available ). All in all, I spent quality time with two French (or nearly French) people.

On Thursday, 13th October, I attended a seminar organized by Orange (the first fruit) on the topic of integrating Apple (second fruit) devices in company activities. I should thank Pierre for his play on words.

About a hundred people showed up the following day of the release of iOS5 in a large conference room at a hotel in Orléans, the seating capacity of which seemed insufficient. One could notice the eagerness of participants, but we weren’t at a keynote.

It is not often that Apple addresses business representatives. This French tour organized by Orange couldn’t be missed. The following presentations were included in the program:

- iPhone & business enterprise
- iPhone application development through the presentation of an Orange subsidiary
- information technology package: Orange’s VDI solution
- BI solution for iPhone/iPad

iOS & business enterprise
The Apple speaker made a presentation of iOS focused on features dedicated to businesses. We should get acquainted with these features, as they relate to important functionalities (deployment of over-the-air applications, profiles, VPN, etc.). There has been a quick presentation of the Sybase park solution (Afaria), which should become an important function when the number of 50 terminals is exceeded. There were predictions of a forthcoming arrival of an iPhone Nano in some circles. Apple has just released an “iPhone 4 8Go”, the price of which is that of any smartphone without the fruit. Obviously, this new terminal makes the iPhone available to a wider range of business users. The migration trend towards mobility is becoming more and more obvious following a recent Gartner survey among company executives, in which 70% of respondents stated that, in 3 years from now, the deployed devices will have a mobile component, and 50% of respondents stated that, in 5 years from now, they will be content producers for their customers besides manufacturing their products.

iOS application development
An Orange subsidiary representative explained how they produced iOS applications quickly and easily. The production industrialization of iOS applications is still at an early stage. I agree with the speaker concerning the fact that the “user experience” required for this type of system should be taken into account for iOS applications.

Information technology packages
This Orange product the existence of which I discovered during this conference is a standard VDI solution at a price starting from 99 euro per user per month. For my part, for this a rather high starting price for office automation, I was surprised that one should call their commercial contact to add new workstations. It is anachronistic for a cloud computing solution.

MicroStrategy’s BI solution
MicroStrategy’s mobile devices introduced in the presentation were the cherry of the fruit basket. In fact, you can see the functionalities of their application in the above video.

Common usage of reports is changing. Excel files will soon become antiquated. I advise the lucky iPad owners to try the freeware which includes many report examples. It’s huge!

Business enterprise IT use is going through a migration stage, the “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) concept is expanding, the end of the PC era is on the horizon, business activities extend beyond company walls (even for non-operating employees), coupled with digital natives who have different requirements from digital immigrants (who entered this world). Business mobility challenges are part of these issues in their own right, contributing to building information systems for the company of the future, as we’ll win the game with outsourcing (cloud) and security solutions thanks to permanent effort, mastery and innovation only.

As for our new services provided by Cloud@VirtualFanatic, mobility is a standard requirement for all the services we integrate on the platform.

However, this conference was of limited interest, but the simple fact that it took place was beneficial. For participants whose IT proficiency is not as high as mine, it could shed light on interesting matters.

On Thursday, 29 September, in Paris, I attended an event about Drupal. Its main topic was “Create tomorrow’s web” and it was organized by CapGemini.

The plan was as follows:
* Drupal global approach by Dries Buytaert – Creator of Drupal and Acquia’s CTO
* Presentation of migrations towards Drupal by Christelle Picq – Voyages-SNCF.com Technology’s ISD (Information Systems Director)
* The e-commerce context by Justin Ziegler – PriceMinister’s CTO
* The evolution of e-commerce by Denis Lafont-Trevisan – Director of CapGemini’s “Centre d’Excellence” for Digital Business Solutions in France
* Presentation of Drupal Commerce by Frédéric Plain – CommerceGuys’ CEO

Beyond Dries’ interesting presentation of the advantage companies can get from choosing Drupal and Christelle’s presentation regarding her implementation on the Voyages-SNCF sites, the implicit topic of this seminar was “Drupal e-commerce”. We are in the middle of Information web practice development, but we are only just beginning to scratch the surface of e-commerce development.

Frédéric talked about the position of DrupalCommerce. After two years of development, the Drupal Commerce team released its 1.0 version. They are clearly favoring e-commerce sites requiring various services. They haven’t tried to provide an out-of-box tool, but a very open solution relying on Drupal values (reliability, performance, scalability, etc.).

Justin & Denis took turns to outline e-commerce history and trends. In France, people were somewhat accustomed to e-commerce use thanks to the past “Minitel” success. Then, Anglo-Saxon companies (Amazon, EBay, etc.) became household names and shaped the practices of meeting expectations by offering dedicated solutions. However, the OpenSource ready-made solutions like those provided via Magento, Shopify and PrestaShop were essential for e-commerce mass adoption. In this context, an OpenSource solution is a synonym for agility.

The e-commerce trends are as follows:
1. The Internet user is active, well informed and gregarious: The average e-commerce website visitor no longer has linear behavior (selection, registration, purchase). He already gathered information on what he wanted via social networks, locally, on the brand’s website, etc. His will to make a controlled purchase shared with others simplifies neither the process of drawing new customers nor that of retaining existing-ones.
2. Brand and relationship digitizing: The brand name can no longer rely solely on its reseller network to promote its product. Before placing an order, the future buyer is very demanding when it comes to the accuracy of information available for buying a product and of the answers he receives. This wealth of information (videos, description, experience sharing, etc.) is essential for converting visitors into buyers.
3. Technological and usage breakthrough: The breakthrough in purchasing practices (complex cycle, frequent feedback, m-commerce, etc.) is obvious. On the other hand, technologies like node.js, NoSQL and HTML5 herald a new generation of platforms, with a decisive break from the previous-ones by pursuing performance, processing concentration on servers (mobile cloud computing) and new user experience capabilities.
4. Mobile and pervasive Internet access: There is a significant rise in the number of purchases made via mobile devices (Smartphone, iPad). Creating a mobile version of a shopping website has become a must. We have pervasive access to online services, as they are available in various settings (in the office, at home, while mobile, etc.).
5. Cross-channel, complexity and volume: The times of the unique customer contact channel are over. There are many contact channels nowadays: the web, mobile channels, physical shops, social networks. The complexity and the amount of information to be managed increase when taking all these channels into account.

There are 3 e-commerce services management lines to be taken into account:
1. Focus on customer experience: The practical elements of the website must be perfect. High quality websites (elegance, navigation, clarity, clear reference points) are in great demand among users. The website visitors are lost if the site fails to catch their attention or is perceived as unreliable.
2. Rhythm and upgradability: An e-commerce platform service must be constantly improved in a noticeable manner. The improvement of the shop’s range of products and services guarantees the development of customer loyalty.
3. Agility: As user practices change rapidly, it is essential to implement an agile organization which could immediately adjust to new requirements.

The Drupal platform use amounts to 2% of Web platforms. However, it is an emerging technology for front-end web platforms requiring a high ramp-up and reduced development time. It is a fact that the community is very active (12,000 modules, 1,300 themes), and this quality ensures its endurance and independence. The creation of an e-commerce building block emerging from regrouping 2 teams (US + FR) emphasizes the ambitions relating to the platform and its community.

In an attempt to make a quick list of Pentalog’s running projects, I can tell you that almost all the e-commerce projects are in PHP. This is also Cap Gemini’s excellence centre’s trend. Our future projects concerning our activity are in PHP as well. Our choices are confirmed by the trends: our front end is in PHP and our most often used transactional part is Java.

If a company decides to sell its products online, this can be easily achieved by using pre-packaged solutions. Insofar as there is strong competition in your sector, the shop’s and products’ graphic quality, the wealth of information, its exposure (SEO) and ability to adjust to user practices are essential factors for maintaining a high level of quality. One must be aware of the fact that the improvement cycle and, therefore, of investment in the platform is a relentless process. It is definitely the price of success.

During a PM Camp on 24^th August, Cornel and I organized our first Innovation Games inspired from the “Buy a feature” exercise. We already have a whole range of training materials available in our catalog drafted for the Incubator, our internal training center. However, for those who have already had some practice with agile software development methodologies and change management, mastering the knowledge is not enough. Individual behaviors are essential for project success.

It is within this framework that we are preparing a training session, “Agility within projects”. Its aim is to emphasize the valuable behaviors when working on a project, through several practical games. Of course, we do not claim to impose a unique behavior, as everybody has their own sensibility, but the purpose of the exercise is to increase the participants’ awareness of other behaviors in environments created from scratch.

For this game inspired from “Buy a feature”, we explained to the participants that each of them would receive a part of the budget from the technical management and that they had to distribute it to a total of 16 missions. They received 20 banknotes of 100 PentAgiles. They could distribute their budget as they saw fit, omitting to allot a budget to a less important mission.

Here is the list of the 15 missions that we selected. Of course, they are taken from real technical management missions.

1. Technical audit at the project start-up
2. Technical audit during project execution
3. Support during the project
4. Technological monitoring
5. Investing in production tools
6. Adapting the needs to the market
7. Making estimates for quotations
8. Appointments with clients
9. Training in best practices
10. Training in tools
11. Training in methods
12. Organizing the sharing of knowledge
13. External communication
14. Internal communication
15. Setting up production indicators

Once the banknotes were distributed, they all became technical directors and started allotting their share of the budget without trying to join resources with a colleague in order to improve the distribution. Therefore, some of them chose not to allot budget to missions such as communication and production indicators. In all cases, they made unilateral choices. In this situation, good agile methodologies practice would have been working in groups to share their opinions and to reach a collaborative prioritization.

This kind of behavior was anticipated. Thus, we have planned a second round, when they were specifically asked to split into two teams, each having the whole budget of the technical management. Various and diverse discussions took place. A team whose members work on Scrum projects decided to vote and reached a consensus. The other team, whose members had various backgrounds, discussed first of all on how they had to organize themselves. Then, they started discussing on the distribution of the budget. Both teams exceeded the time limit set for the discussions. I had set a 15-minute time limit for the first part. I had deliberately (and successfully) trapped them by not setting a time limit.

In conclusion, here are several lessons to be learned from this exercise:

- When it comes to collective work (sharing the budget), it is important to collaborate and exchange in order to ensure the needs are met.
- Even in an environment where there are few rules, it is advisable to establish some requirements (common methods, etc).
- The relationship with time is often complex, as each of us has their own sense of time, but we must manage time by imposing a time limit to a collaboration. It must remain effective.
- In an environment without a designated manager, one can notice that the people who take control are those who have the will to make the mission progress.

The participants will be able to express their views on this blog regarding this exercise, but it was rewarding as a first experience. For the future PM Camps, we’ll do other exercises, otherwise, we won’t be able to have 2 rounds anymore.

For those interested in these innovation games, I advise you to read Luke HOHMANN’s book, “Innovation games”. You’ll find the description of other games in this book (among others):

Speed Boat: Identifying what the client doesn’t like about your products or services.
Product Box: Identifying the most exciting product characteristics.
Remember the Future : Understanding your clients’ definition of success.
Show & Tell: Identifying the most important artifacts created by your product
Start your day: Understanding when and how your client uses your products.

I’ll have the opportunity to come back to the results of these experiments through Innovation Games. We are within an Agile cycle, we experiment, evaluate and decide (PDCA).

On Saturday, the 24^th of August, Cornel and I organized a Project Management Camp in Chisinau, the delivery center (DC) of Pentalog, of about a hundred people in the Republic of Moldova. We organize this kind of events in the DCs several times a year to bring project managers and team leaders together and enable them to exchange ideas and to be informed about new perspectives on a project concerning the organization, management, and, sometimes technical aspects. These events are deemed very collaborative and interactive.

The theme of this session was aimed at improving the maturity of practices and participants in projects. The topics proposed to the ten participants were the following:

- System dynamics, root causes, continuous improvement and learning cycles, retrospectives
- Business value, value VS waste, Value Stream Map, Lean Management
- Wishful thinking, Team Velocity, Planning and Estimation
- Self-Organizing teams, Definition of Done, Team welfare
- Differences between traditional development and agile software development methodology

On Friday evening, the participants who accepted the invitations voted for the 3 topics (in bold on the above-mentioned list) they wanted to be covered. In addition to these topics, I presented the tools used by the infrastructure team to manage our virtualized infrastructure in our data center. They already know how it is done since the deployment of our new infrastructure. I also presented the provisioning interface layout which will enable them to manage the virtual machines themselves within the limits of the resources made available for the project as regards our private cloud.

Business value, value VS waste, Value Stream Map, Lean Management
This topic was covered in three stages.

- Theoretical presentation of these topics
- Presentation of experience feedback in the field of agile / lean software development methodologies and a concrete application example of value stream map
- Organizing a practical exercise for emphasizing the value of collaboration. I will talk about this exercise in a future article.

Wishful thinking, Team Velocity, Planning and Estimation
The concepts were quickly presented in order to be able to share experiences. Cornel detailed several indicators to match the team’s speed. We agreed that one of the participants would lead a sharing knowledge session based on their assessments on related items.

Self-Organizing teams, Definition of Done, Team welfare
When comparing the “Command & Control” and “Self-Organizing teams” concepts, the participants expressed their views depending on their current experience and projects. Our aim was not to reach the conclusion that only one approach was perfect, but to set a clear trend towards a self-organizing team for projects where the needs are clearly expressed.

As we systematically calculate it at the end of a PM Camp, the ROTI (return on time invested) rate was 3.8 (the grades were between 3 and 5). Around the closing round table, all the participants proved to be very satisfied with the covered topics and the interactivity of the discussions. Many thanks to the project managers for attendance and active participation.

PM Camps will go on taking place in other delivery centers. The organization and the topics are to be suggested in Iasi, Brasov, Bucarest, Cluj and Sibiu.

That’s it !!

Since last week, the bridgehead of our private cloud is operational. The infrastructure team has been working on this project for several months:
- Assessing the needs
- Choosing the solution
- Preparing the deployment
- Presenting the budget (it’s a very substantial budget)
- Deployment
- Validation for production

Our previous server infrastructure choices dated back to 2005, when we decided to deploy an IBM blade center. Progressively and according to our growing needs in development, we made this infrastructure evolve by upgrading the blade center to its maximum capacity and by adding a bay with a storage space of several terabytes. We had no regrets regarding the choices we made, as, starting with 2006, they enabled us to virtualize our environment to a great extent, first, in a heterogeneous manner (XEN, Virtual Server, ESXi) to migrate all the elements in ESXi (free VMWare hypervisor) starting with 2007, after a validation stage. In the beginning of 2011, we reached 150 machines that run manually (a good performance according to VMWare) and an almost fully loaded storage. Even if during these last months the situation was difficult before the deployment of the new infrastructure, we were able to limit overconsumption by maintaining a firm and strict management. This approach proved to be successful and we are going to use it in managing these execution and storage spaces.

For this new platform that we have deployed, we have made the following choices:
- Storage: EMC², by choosing this solution, we have discovered a reliable integration with VMWare. Hitachi had made an interesting proposal, but EMC² won very narrowly.
- Server: Blade Center IBM, we pursued with IBM to continue the past investment. The servers are of a newer generation, therefore much more powerful. However, we studied the Cisco offer with the UCS, but the costs were a little higher. The very unified approach of Cisco is interesting. If we are looking for an alternative offer at IBM, we could turn to Cisco.
- Network: Brocade, their offer was more interesting than Cisco’s.
- Virtualization: VMWare vSphere, we have pursued our previous choice, by integrating the VMWare tools.

With the almost 150 machines we run, it was becoming difficult to provide good quality services for manual actions. We have reached the limits of what was humanly possible. The tools are expensive with regard to our payrolls (extension of the ROI), but in order to ensure an automation and an increase in service quality, it is necessary for us to move on to a high-performance virtual machine management environment. In fact, the vMotion, vStorage and DRS tools, and being able to cluster nodes are going to lead to a significant service quality increase.

We were looking for a flexible solution and, for the moment, we haven’t had unpleasant surprises regarding this issue. Of course, this equipment is redundant, it has to enable us to ensure an availability that exceeds 99.99%.

There are multiple objectives concerning this infrastructure:
- To be the first brick in our private internal cloud
- To enable us to answer needs with higher storage and execution capacities
- To be the starting point for our Cloud commercial services

The cloud solution we are preparing is going to enable our clients to install their own “virtual private cloud” in a secure environment and only accessible via a private network (fix or mobile). The administrator/client will have an application catalog at his disposal (for free and for a fee) based on which he could request/buy the installation. In a second stage, the server will be extended to workstations localized in the cloud. These services will use the cloud data and will be used with several terminal types. For this approach, we will have to be supported by a cloud industrial company.

From now on, the new platforms requested will be deployed based on these new resources. The models are ready. The existing part will be migrated at the beginning of September in a transparent manner, but not without notification icon_smile. This will be transparent as the IP addresses and the access remain the same.

As I was saying before, these new resources are the first assembly stages of our private cloud. The following are still to be done:
- Integrate the resources in Romania in the cloud to ensure balance
- Provide the project managers with the capacity of provisioning these resources (convergence with our cloud solution)
- Centralize the workstations of this private cloud
- Measure the consumption of resources per project accurately.

In the beginning of June, Pentalog published its first application under its own trademark on AppleStore. Several applications had already been released, but under the names of various clients of ours.

This first application is called “ProxyVoIP”. The aim of this application is to reduce the cost of telephone calls made abroad as well as to allow a more efficient use of our unlimited call package to Pentalog numbers.

The application simply works like a VPN. First, the call is transferred to a Pentalog number where our centrex filters the authorized numbers. The requested number is then dialed by the application and Centrex takes over routing the call to the targeted phone number.

This application is easy to use. We have integrated geolocalization, as, we have to call a national number for the system to be cost-effective.

We have been using this tool for many months (direct installation on the iphone), and the fair thing to do was to share it.

Click here to access this application on iTunes:

A few drawbacks for this solution:

- It may not be attractive when on roaming

- The phone switch has to be easily commuted to configure the management settings

- The time for launching a call is longer with this intermediary stage.

Since the beginning of the year, Iulia (the ISD software unit manager), Alex (the ISD infrastructure manager) and Cornel (technical director) have been working to define the technologies that we are going to use as part of the next generation of our Information System.

We started from a series of questions in order to implement our approach and make a few choices:
- What are our back-office and front-office needs?
- What applications do we need in order to provide the most suitable solution?
- What security level shall we set?
- How important are OpenSource solutions within our information system?
- What are the consequences for our resources? PentaCloud?
- How will we manage information and administer the information system?

The situation of our information system dates back to a period when our priorities focused on Infrastructure, Applications and Services. Our current approach is oriented towards services (Services – Applications – Infrastructure) which is a consequence of our growth and the distribution of decisions. We use technologies like Java, .Net, PHP and Microsoft Access (for the oldest applications). In order to help us with our choice, we have also taken into account the workloads which were required for pure development during the first three months of the year: Java = 75 days – PHP = 55 days – .Net = 54 days.

To sum up our situation, the information system relies on an SOA/BPM architecture in which applications meet a very specific need and display services in order to render information more dynamic. These are “in-house” applications developed in Java or OpenSource applications (in PHP) which are all focused on a dedicated function.

Our approach didn’t consist in determining the tools to be integrated into the information system but rather in choosing the technologies to be used in order to meet functional expectations that we will integrate/develop with the end customers.

Here is a list of choices and actions that we have decided upon in order to implement these options:
- BPM Integration: Talend (Java)
- Business BPM: Bonita (Java)
- Document management: Alfresco (Java)
- Public content management: Liferay (Java)
- Social network: Framework to be determined

With a view to limiting the range of technologies, we were thinking about choosing a single technology between Java and PHP. But this has turned out to be useless because back-office tools (talend, bonita etc.) are based on Java and this will always require Java skills in order to ensure the development, integration and implementation. We will always have OpenSource tools. In the end, we chose PHP & Java. Existing .Net applications will remain for as long as we use .Net tools.

In order to ensure the “security” component of applications (especially for exposed applications), we have defined a set of rules to be observed during development and to be validated during the test phase.

There are still details to be worked out (we know that the devil is in the details) by Iulia in collaboration with Catalin (one of the DT experts). But our roadmap has been drawn up and launched. The new projects to be started will be based on these definitions.

We are still wondering what software monitoring tools to use with the tools that we deploy. Hyperic (Spring) is very interesting but is very limited in terms of PHP platform administration.

We are now trying to define a team competence mapping in order to determine our training needs which will be met by the Incubator.

[Episode 10] – Data center in Orléans

Last week, I was asked a few questions by Julien from the neighbouring Orléans Val de Loire agglomeration, as part of a study which he is carrying out with regard to the expectations and the necessity of data centers in Orléans.

Pentalog has been using data center colocation services since 1999. As our needs and demands are constantly evolving, we are now at our 5th location. As a provider of outsourced services and CIO, I was therefore the right person to answer his questions. We completed our interview with a visit to the data center where our equipment is based. But I will write another article on what we have finished deploying.

In short, here are the requirements that Pentalog might have if colocation resources were available in Orléans:
- International operators (WAN tiers): Several operators need to be present. The milliseconds in service quality matter. The direct presence of these operators in Orléans would entail a genuine competition, thus offering a wide range of high-performance services.
- Virtual ISP (VISP): The outsourcing of hosting does not mean that we want to manage the entire chain. The presence of at least one VISP in the data center which takes over the virtualization of network layers (multi-homing, BGP4 etc.) is an important aspect.
- Intervention services: Although remote interventions allow to cover most actions, it is essential to be able to call a technician who can push an On/Off button. We have used this type of services approximately 5 times in 2 years. We don’t need this service often, but when we do, it is a real asset.
- Consumption follow-up: A view of the data center consumption in order to allow us to calculate the PUE at the power outlet.
- Different other requirements: I will randomly mention a floor resistance with a load of more than 1 ton/m2 for ensuring a high density; physical protection of the premises; video access to the camera close to the bay (or integrated into the bay); incident / humidity / temperature protection.

Potential clients who might be interested in these services:

- Information Systems Departments might be interested in outsourcing their infrastructure if the management of a robust server room is not the company’s core business. This is all the more true as the presence of numerous operators optimizes bandwidth costs. But company headquarters which require these services are not so numerous in this department.
- The proximity between Orléans and the Paris metropolitan area would maintain data centers in the required range for ensuring synchronous Dual Building services (mirror infrastructure). As the Paris metropolitan area is becoming saturated, those who co-rent here could look for these alternatives in a less expensive area.

As regards the choice of location, everything is debatable. But, following my reflections on the subject:
- The town centre must be avoided because of the limited parking space
- Industrial buildings (or areas) could be an interesting solution (dual feeds) as they have power inlets and maybe even disused offices
- The proximity of operators’ fiver optics allows to limit civil engineering works.
- The work space must be extensible in order to accommodate emergency groups.

With cloud computing services which may need to be located in France and require a high quality of service (reliable latency), community data centers have an interest, but the market still seems to be difficult. Therefore, it is necessary to determine the role that local communities will play in this project.

[Episode 09] ISD – Building the future of our information systems

[Episode 11] ISD – Choice of technologies

Last week, I organized in Brasov the seminar of my department (Infrastructures and Information Systems – DISI) which is held twice or three times a year. In this session, we switched from a type of organization made up of presentations and discussions to a general theme handled collaboratively. The theme was “communication”. DISI is a support department; therefore, we have to ensure a good communication with our (internal) clients in order to have visibility over our projects.

Our guests for this seminar were the Business Liners (Pierre and Mickaël) and Hélène, the Marketing Director, in addition to the usual participants (Aleth, Iulia, Alex, Cornel and I).

Our guests appreciated the morning round table discussion on the ongoing projects and the future actions. Could this be a lack of communication?

Afterwards, we began a collaborative post-it exercise on a series of questions where everyone groups into two mixed teams (DISI + guests), answers the questions and votes on the four most important answers. Here are the basic questions and the main answers provided.

- What has been done? Volatile communication (Chat, Facebook, Telephone), best practices, steering committees and internal tools (tickets).
- What are the values? Sharing, Decision making, Risk prevention, Motivation Enhancement, Increasing productivity/efficiency.
- What are the expectations? Advice, Listening, Information feedback, Professionalism
- What are the objectives? Global internal objective, Management, Production, DISI internal objective
- What are the required means? Company Social Network, Budget, Meetings
- What is a good communication? It must be clear, simple, it must include arguments and be transmitted on an adapted support; it must be targeted, with a clear objective, and feedback and comprehension must be measured.
In order to finish the exercise, we identified what was done and needed to be redone, what no longer needed to be redone, as well as what wasn’t done and needed to be done, and what didn’t need to be done.

In the afternoon, Lucie who helps us set up our WebTV, came to shoot a short video during our seminar in order to produce a clip which was edited at light speed. It has already been included in the first video materials of the Pentalog WebTV.

The first comments posted on our Facebook walls following this video are almost unanimous: “You are pretty!” We are going to have to believe it.

Based on this collaborative work, department managers have to work with their teams in order to turn these guidelines into facts for their activities. We will perform an assessment during our next seminar in October.

We ended this 8-hour seminar with a ROTI analysis in which everyone assessed their time investment benefits. The average mark was 3.5. I would like to thank all guests for their active participation in our works.

As planned with Cornel and Iulia, we extended our trip to the city-state of Singapore by a few hours, before returning to Europe in an A380, following our mission to Hanoi.

The city center is quite impressive, as it comes very close to perfection, perhaps too much so. The streets and subway are incredibly clean. Within an area of several square kilometres you can find banks, telecommunication companies, cultural sites and malls. They can be seen everywhere and are often thematic (restaurants, luxury or IT shops etc.). After having visited the IT mall in Bangkok, we found the one in Singapore to be as exciting. The Surcouf IT mall in Paris could use a bit of revamping. We passed by the legendary places of this city:

- Marina Bay with its enormous hotel
- A nighttime tour in the Flyer (Giant wheel)
- the Merlion, the half-lion, half-fish symbol of the city
- the Raffles Hotel, with its 19th century colonial architecture
- the Chinatown which blends well together with the rest of the city
- Boad Quay, a series of tourist restaurants by the water

This 700 km2 city of approximately 5 million inhabitants is very cosmopolitan, with an estimated foreign population of 40%, of which 70% is made up of Chinese immigrants. It has a high living standard (its GDP ranks 18th worldwide – it is almost equivalent to that of France). When visiting the zoo outside the city, we didn’t witness fundamental changes. The towers disappeared, only to make room for decent blocks of flats (we didn’t see all of them). It was a hot day without air conditioning.

As part of Pentalog’s cloud plans, we could return to Singapore (or Hong Kong) in order to set up local Cloud Computing services. The major telecom operators in the region are SingTel (important sponsor of the nighttime F1 grand prix), PCCW (Hong Kong) and NTT (Japan) and we will undoubtedly use their boards for installing our infrastructure in order to benefit from the best latency times. As regards the IT hardware in Singapore, while the iPad price is quite appealing there, they didn’t have it on stock in the stores I visited. There is a global shortage.

The airport follows the same line: commercial mall, huge proportions, extremely clean etc. It handled over 42 million passengers in 2010 (as compared to 58 million for Charles de Gaulle).

Cornel and Iulia were charmed by the perfectionism of this city. I have a more moderate opinion, as even though I admit the city comes close to perfection, I think that, over time, our Latin temperaments could grow tired of this neatness.

I don’t know if you remember this song from Murray Head, dating back to the last century (1984), in which he compared Bangkok and its nightlife to a game of chess. Last weekend, I travelled to Bangkok to spend a night there, thus accompanying Thierry in his habitual journey to Bangkok.

As this was my first time in Bangkok, I could feel the contrast of this megalopolis of more than 9 million (official) inhabitants, between its modern towers and its neighbourhoods from days gone by where the king and his family are actively present.

The journey unfolded as follows:
- On our arrival, we had a plentiful meal in a Japanese restaurant with a generous buffet
- We visited the city centre and MBK (large mall)
- We went to a seafood restaurant (which was truly delightful)
- We strolled down the “night market”. This is a pop-up market on the pavement where you can find everything and which takes a considerable part of your night time. It is a most colourful place.

Early on Sunday morning, we went to the “Chatuchak weekend market” which hosts an impressive 8,000 shops of all types (clothing, decoration, food, various trinkets etc.), crammed together on 14 hectares, in old buildings grouped into thematic areas. The animal area is quite impressive. As Thierry said on arriving, “Here, even when you don’t need anything, you still find something to buy”.

As it was the beginning of the monsoon, we had quite a few showers. It is amazing how foreigners stop moving when it rains, while locals continue about their business in their panchos.

We finished our journey with a visit to Pantip Plaza, the most important IT commercial centre where, on a surface of several tens of thousands of square metres, one can find all types of IT equipment (computers, accessories etc.). Unfortunately, I didn’t spend enough time there to notice what the tendencies were. But, of course, there are numerous Apple stores and tablets of all kinds.

We ended our “Mall” weekend at the Bangkok airport which is quite splendid. It is trying to assert itself as an alternative to Singapore. Its duty-free must therefore have branded products. With the arrival of the A380 airplanes in 2012, the airport will be able to attract more tourists travelling to the region. In 2010, this airport entered the top 10 “World Airport Awards rankings”.

The weekend was, therefore, rather shopping-oriented. But this gives me the possibility of returning to the city (which is only 1.5 hours away from Hanoi) for a more touristic visit. I’d like to thank Thierry for this quick and interesting trip to a city that he is very familiar with.

Next weekend, I will go on a two-day trip to Singapore before returning to France. Will it be another shopping weekend?

Here is an article that I wrote after the PM Camp that was organized in the Hanoi office last Saturday:

Cornel (Pentalog technical director) and I took advantage of our simultaneous presence in our Hanoi office to organize a new PM Camp (Project Manager Camp) session for 15 project managers / team leaders / future project managers. As a reminder, these sessions which last an entire day (on Saturday) bring together the project managers of a branch office in order to discuss on subjects that concern them directly. We usually talk about organization, quality, customer relations and technical matters. The idea is to provide project managers with the opportunity to present and discuss their problems.

For this new season, we have tried to improve the interactivity of these discussions. Last year, we used to offer a local PM the opportunity to tackle a subject of his choice in addition to other topics that Cornel and I covered.

This PM Camp had the following agenda:
- Agile vs V Cycle
- Case study
- Lean management
- Reminder of the services provided by the technical department and the Incubator

For the first subject, the presentation focused on customer expectations (their desire to start their project quickly, to make changes etc.). For every customer expectation, regarding software development methodologies, I presented the V cycle solution, while Cornel described the Agile method approach. Before going to the next expectation, we asked the participants to vote on the method that they found to be the most suitable to the expectation. All project managers were very active. In the end, the Agile method won (by far), despite the fact that we didn’t favour any method in our presentations.

We will resume this subject in our future PM Camps by changing it a little. We will add a few expectations (we had 11 in our last session) and we are going to use an approach that I saw in an Agile seminar called “Innovation game: Buy a feature”. Every participant receives an amount of money in a fictitious currency, “Penta-Euro” for instance. Instead of the seminar leader choosing a random subject, the participants are the ones who form groups in order to buy the topics they are interested in. This collaboration is specific to the Agile method.

“Case studies” are dealt with by using a collaborative assistance approach. We enumerated a few cases (for example: my client doesn’t want to sign the PQP) and for each of them, project managers could ask questions in order to better define the (possible) problem and then make propositions. Obviously, the purpose of this exercise isn’t to find the right answer, as it doesn’t really exist, but to work on the approach. The discussions on some of these cases were quite intense.

After a Vietnamese meal in a “Bia Hoi”, consisting of deer courses (salad, grilled meat, blood tart etc.), Cornel tackled the subject of Lean Management, thus orienting the discussion towards waste. For each of the types of waste mentioned, project managers could step in and present the cases that they were dealing with. This was another element on which we collaborated well.

In the end, Cornel reminded the participants that the technical department and the Incubator could generate value for them through technical expertise, training and the capitalization of knowledge.

Another novelty of this new PM Camp season consists in ending the sessions with a formal questionnaire on the Project Managers’ satisfaction with regard to this PM Camp: General impression, quality of subjects, applicable values, recommendation and a ROTI (Return on Time Investment). The last point is aimed at determining whether the time spent is worth the investment.

ROTI FOR THIS MEETING!

Value Feedback Lean Thinking! Transparency Courage

“Excellent. This has been a great meeting that I will benefit from. It would have been worth spending a lot more time.”

“Good. This has been a meeting above average. I have gained more than the time that I spent on it.”

“Average. It hasn’t been a waste of time, nothing more than that.”

“ Useful, but it wasn’t entirely worth the time I spent on it. Therefore, I wasted time.”

“Useless. I haven’t gained and learned anything. I really wasted 1 hour!”

We achieved a positive result, with an average of 15.6 / 20.

After a brief analysis, we are satisfied with the interactivity that we had this session. For the following sessions in Europe, we have identified a few small improvements.

I took advantage of the few (exceptional) weeks that I spent in France by attending a few spring seminars:
- March 31st: ScrumDay 2011, organized by the French Scrum User Group
- April 1st: VMWare seminar on virtualized workstations
- April 5th: Seminar on Cyber Criminality, organized by Stonesoft

ScrumDay 2011
For ScrumDay 2011, I wrote a series of articles on our new thematic blog, called Methods and Technologies, where I presented all seminar sessions that I attended.

Virtualization of workstations
This is a subject that I regularly follow, as it is part of a scheme of industrializing our developers’ work environment. But the business model is not yet a viable one as regards the gain in workstation management. I was recently talking to a top manager of a French IT facilities management group which already offers package solutions. We agreed on the fact that the market was not yet ready for a massive deployment of DaaS (Desktop as a Service), but that service providers needed to be prepared.

Several companies were present at this seminar, as the VDI is not a solution, but a chain:

- VMWare: bare-metal virtualization. Other solutions are of course possible, but this solution is reliable, robust and is not new on the market.
- ThinPrint: Solution that facilitates remote printing
- RES Software: Tools for managing the deployment of patches, applications on platforms.
- RiverBed: It is now possible to deploy the appliance in a virtual machine. This is becoming more flexible than the hardware version. Moreover, it seems possible to optimize the RDP flow. We have done the test in order to optimize our flows with Vietnam, and I can say if gains are possible on the RDP, we shall ask ourselves the question again.
- Wyse: Their new product “Zero” is interesting: it is even less cumbersome, more energy efficient, without a local OS, but dedicated to one use.

Nevertheless, I doubt that a desktop environment, which is rather static, could have real gains, despite offering some benefits:

- Anonymization of the workstation: changing the physical support, but keeping the software environment
- Better data security: the workstation is more accessible, USB access is more restricted
- Reducing energy consumption: physical machines stop based on the need of virtual machines

In the Pentalog context, the gain consists in offering standardized working environments in an automated manner.

AET – Cyber criminality
The seminar on cyber criminality was really interesting. It was organized by StoneSoft which presented its approach on AET (Advanced Evasion Technique). This seminar was hosted by Anicet Mbida (an IT reporter on BFM TV) and included three stages:
- Presentation of the AET approach by Juha Kivikoski, Stonesoft’s COO (AET site)
- Presentation of Gartner’s 10 pieces of advice by Bob Walder, for choosing a protection solution.
- Debate on cyber criminality, which included the above-mentioned participants who were joined by Nicolas Arpagian, editor-in-chief of the “Prospective Stratégique” magazine, and Pierre Polette, LEXSI’s director.

The debate began with a fact related to accounting. Over the last three years, three major cyber crimes were noted. In 2011, the three major crimes already occurred in the first quarter. This can be analyzed from several points of view:
Protection systems are more and more reliable and attacks are better identified. Let us not forget that a good intrusion attack succeeds when it is not known/seen.
There is a growing awareness with regard to the need to present facts which could serve as a reminder. The events which have taken place at the French Ministry of Finance can be an example.
The number of Mafia-type organizations or the desire to cause harm is increasing and flaws are more and more exploited.

I have already tackled security in one of my previous articles of the ISD saga and I want to add a few things. I would just like to discuss a case that was mentioned: an identified employee from the financial department was caught off-guard and proved to be vulnerable. He was asked on three occasions by phone, by a person who assumed the identity of a manager, to make a bank transfer of one million euros every time. It is only the fourth time that he began to ask himself questions. This story is meant to emphasize that security concerns everyone and that one must not expect the technical department to provide solutions to all faults of the human behaviour.

Since the beginning of the year, we have been formalizing the administration of Pentalog’s information system. I will resume this subject in another post. Some of the actions that we had envisaged in the scope of this formalization process include the setting up of a multi-tenant listening system, the learning of business needs through steering committees. But we needed to have a more general level.

This listening operation is aimed at starting a prospective reflection process on Pentalog’s future. Indeed, at the end of 2008, the planning and market intelligence management had proposed a strategic plan for implementation. The first plan was on the medium-term as it extended until 2010 and set forth the objective of reaching a sales figure of 14 million euros. We ended up by earning 17.5 million. The second plan was on the long term, which has now turned into a medium term, and consists in registering a sales figure of 30 million euros. In 2010, we put in a great deal of effort to detail our view and the strategic lines of the 2013 plan in order to mobilize employees towards reaching clear objectives, not just figures.
Through this vast survey, we are trying to create a mapping of:
- the perception and the understanding of the strategy that is being deployed
- the professional progress of the interviewed people in relation to this high growth
- the improvement points of the company, the practices, methods and performance
- the IT view which allows to meet the objectives
- the innovation at Pentalog
- security

Since last week, I have been organizing prospective interviews together with Thierry (internal project management team). We are going to interview almost 50 people through all our “delivery centers”, from all company levels and representing virtually all professions. This will take several weeks. The interview should last between 45 minutes and two hours (for the more talkative ) in order that all 70 survey questions are answered.

The deliverables of this survey will be:
- An overview of the survey results
- A draft of the 2012-2015 master plan (which remains to be elaborated by the different governing committees of the IS)

We have already held 9 interviews in Chisinau (Republic of Moldova) and I would like to provide here a “fresh” feedback. After having questioned 20% of the people, a few trends are beginning to emerge. We have met people who are very interested in taking part in this exercise. The desire to participate in the “company growth” adventure is easily noticeable. I would like to thank those who have already participated for their time and preparation. As regards future interviewees, they will receive an invitation to schedule the interview. They will also receive the questionnaire so that they may be as prepared as possible.

I will of course post another article with the most important results of this survey.

[Episode 08] A last-minute change of mind

Everything was ready:
- The migration plan was ready
- The internal and external communications had been published
- The contract was almost signed
- The change management stages had been clearly identified and planned (presentation in offices)
- Pilot users and others were looking forward to fully using the Google environment
- Discussions on the security of the solution had already taken place.

During the latest discussions on the subject between Frédéric (CEO), Virginie (CFO) and I (CIO), we reopened the debate on the confidence that we could place in an outsourced messaging system. Although we reopened it rather late, it is never too late as long as the contract hasn’t been signed. In terms of security and robustness, there was no doubt as to the toughness of Google’s solution systems. As I mentioned in my article on migration, if we leave the storing volume aside (25GB / user), the costs are the same. Our problem pertained to the level of confidence that we could place in the system.

As far as outsourced solutions are concerned, we must be neither paranoid, nor naive. We simply must set our standards according to our needs. As long as a system is capable of indexing email content and, based on this information, it can offer commercials (free version), what prevents the system from reacting to sensitive information in a completely transparent manner?

We therefore changed our minds at the last minute due to the risks that this choice could entail for our customers with whom we sign confidentiality agreements, we work on R&D subjects etc. We didn’t want to ask our customers what they thought about outsourcing our messaging server. When you ask someone about potential fears, their first answer will be that you need to find a method of protection against those fears. We changed our minds despite also knowing that we were losing the considerable gains in productivity that this complete ecosystem could offer us.

There are several people (infrastructure department, pilot users, users of personal Google services) who might be disappointed in our decision, as they might feel that we are abandoning a promised land, but this choice was necessary considering the risks that we were taking. Users need to know that, although we won’t reach the same level of service as Google overnight, we are already deploying a plan in order to come close to that level. As far as the infrastructure is concerned, we are now planning on providing advanced training sessions on our messaging server for strengthening your skills in order to improve our messaging infrastructure (AS, AV, Cluster etc.).

The reversibility plan initially designed for pilot users was launched immediately after we made our decision. Now, we no longer have any Google applications (if I were being paranoid, I would wonder whether they are truly deleted). I feel a little sorry for Antoine (commercial department) who had done a good job with this proposition through sustained monitoring; it’s a pity. But these are also the rules of the game.

Generally speaking, should all ISDs refuse to use Google’s business services? Answers to this question can be very different. The ISD should not make its choices by using fear as an excuse. But, in order to make sure that the ISD is in line with company strategy, the objectives of the company need to be understood. As a nearshore/offshore IT services company, we need to build customer confidence. By integrating Google into our customer relations, there would have been a doubt as to our complete impartiality as there is a real convergence with Google (IT innovation, software publisher etc.). I know publishers, at least one retirement insurance company, universities, SMEs and many others which use Google services. They felt that their level of confidence was sufficient. But in the end, our choice was made between an outsourced solution and an internal solution in order to ensure a higher level of confidentiality in our customer communication.

[Episode 07] Migrating the instant messaging service to Google

The history of our messaging server began in 1996 with Oléane which included 10 accounts. In order to optimize costs, we internalized this service in 1998 and managed our server on our own with a sendmail (up to 80 accounts). In 2002, in order to improve services and facilitate administration, we deployed Extremail, an OpenSource solution in linux (up to 250 accounts). In 2007, we decided to reinforce our messaging service and have a multiuser calendar program by deploying Zimbra, initially with its community version and then with the commercial version in order to have the push mode for mobile equipment. We now have more than 600 users and we are trying to further improve the service in order to make sure that we reach the 1,000 or 2,000-account milestone in the best conditions.

The aspects that we needed to improve were:
* Increasing messaging availability: In 2010, we had 600 minutes of unavailability due to different reasons and never at the right moment.
* Reducing mail delivery time: With the arrival of significant mail flows, the antivirus and antispam server delayed the delivery of emails by a few minutes (sometimes by up to 30 minutes).
* Reinforcing security: Having a better performing antispam and antivirus engine.
* Having a storing space: This means that we need to offer everyone the possibility to leave their emails on the server in order to ensure better preservation.

And all this starting from what we already have: push mode for mobiles, intensive use of distribution lists, user-friendly administration. We also needed to reduce the budget allocated to platform administration and maintenance. Even though we have the adequate infrastructure, we didn’t need to maintain the platform in our infrastructure.

We have compared the capabilities of Zimbra 7 and Google Apps for Business. On paper, Google has a high rate of availability (30 minutes of unavailability in 2009, 0 minutes in 2010). Delivery times are less than 5s between a Pentalog domain and Google (with an attachment of 100k). The storing space per user is 25GB. The annual net cost is 50 euros/user. The cost for zimbra with the same features (maintenance, storing space etc.) is 108 euros / year / person. These costs are calculated for 600 people including migration, maintenance and actions taken over three years. If we leave storing aside in this cost calculation, we obtain almost the same cost.

The question is more related to security. Can we trust Google’s security systems? We can also call into question the security of an outsourced service in which a great amount of information is sent. Although we are constantly investing in security, we cannot rise to Google’s level. Google has certificates on infrastructure security which allow to accept outsourcing. Despite having consulted local economic intelligence services, they don’t have a definite answer to the question. We need to pay particular attention to transfers (encrypting exchanges via https) and to the security level of passwords.

In the end, why have we chosen Google? Although messaging will remain an essential tool, it will decrease in importance as our social network develops. The messaging service and calendar will be the first functions to be used, but the scope will extend to Google Docs, Google Chat and we are already looking into ways to integrate Google Apps into our information system.

In order to prepare this migration, we have paid a great deal of attention to change management:
* A team consisting of 25 pilot users has been created (different levels of responsibility, different locations, different needs etc.).
* The satisfaction survey (carried out using GoogleDocs) sent at the end of the test period yielded positive results and enabled us to identify subjects on which we needed to provide more information. I would like to thank them for their participation. They also offered arguments for choosing this solution.
* A presentation will be made in all offices to explain how this migration is going to be carried out.
* We are already posting best practices into our internal knowledge base (text and videos).

The migration in itself will not actually be risky. Messages have already been delivered for the two platforms (Zimbra in production and Google) in order that pilot users continue using Google Apps. The longest phase will consist in transferring the entire Zimbra content over to Google. We will therefore have no service availability breakdowns, except for the history feature during the transfer phase.

Before the end of February we will therefore have changed our messaging solution. It will open new possibilities for us. Everyone will benefit from it in no time. If some of you have fears, don’t hesitate to contact me or the local infrastructure team so that we may dispel them.

[Episode 06] Information system security concerns everyone

This subject is inexhaustible but it can easily tire everyone as not everybody has the same preoccupations. The guarantors of this information system security can be considered extremists or obstacles to efficient practices. Users who are looking to achieve efficiency can be deemed as notoriously lax, as they want to get around security systems. Nevertheless, we must set things straight…

This is not a New Year’s resolution (by the way, Happy New Year to everyone!), as we have been working on it for several weeks, but we are planning to organize a seminar, a round table or a “grenelle” (a trendy term) on security which would bring together a representative number of company employees. The objective of this seminar is to reach a general agreement on what constitutes proper security for our company, offices, projects or even individuals.

Until now we have had an overall approach on security, i.e. we have implemented the same security level for everyone. We are noticing an increasing number of requests for providing special permissions, which affects security and its general use, as there are too many special cases.

We must obviously continue to use an all-encompassing approach on security, as it must provide an appropriate protection on our digital assets, as well as those of our clients for whom we carry out projects. I am sure that if we asked individual Pentalog employees for their opinion, most of them would consider that security is important and that it must be improved at all times. There are numerous similarities between security and quality: everyone agrees to play by the rules, but changing practices is often difficult.

We will therefore all agree that a proper security must:
- be adapted to context: neither excessive, nor too lax.
- regularly raise awareness.
- constantly be improved.
- concern everyone.
- apply an overall strategy to entire systems.

In addition, we must not overlook the fact that in IT offshoring, security is an element of confidence to the same extent as our employees’ abilities. We already have a good reputation in this respect as we have proven our approach, our abilities, our vision, but we must live up to our reputation through our actions and we must constantly improve our security.

Another element that bears similarities with quality is budget. When awareness is not raised within the company, the justification of a budget or the deployment of a new solution are often difficult to present, as they are based on potential loss whose events are not certain. But choices can be supported based on the experiences of others.

In order to improve our security, we are, therefore, going to have discussions on a range of topics: user access, VPN, backup, use of resources, protection of resources, company/office/project/individual needs; what improvements can be made to the infrastructure elements that we already have? How can we make sure that security instructions are adequately applied by everyone? And the list of subjects can go on. I am hereby inviting all Pentalog employees who want to participate in this online seminar. In order that the seminar is well prepared, volunteers will be offered the opportunity to get to know one another on our social network and take part in preliminary exchanges of information on this same platform. The seminar will be hosted by Alex, our infrastructure and security director. This seminar must enable us to bring our discussions to an end and thus determine our security choices for the infrastructure department.

I will post another article on this blog in order to provide feedback on Pentalog employees’ enthusiasm for this subject and on the discussions that took place during this seminar. It will be a bit tricky to present the aspects that need to be improved, but I will try to make an overall synthesis.

[Episode 05] A feature team for website development

At the end of 2010, we reached a transitional phase on our website environment redesign project. Since the autumn of 2009, we have put online several thematic sites in several languages:
- http://www.choosingmyitserviceprovider.com: Online sales meeting for receiving an instant commercial proposition.
- www.madeinoffshore.com: Catalog of our success stories.
- www.pentalog-speaking.com: Collection of our interventions.
- www.pentalog-jvprogram.com: Presentation of our partnership programme.
- www.pentalog.tv: Access to our video content in a YouTube channel.
- www.pentalog.com: Corporate site in five languages.
- PriceMaker: This function/application is present on almost all our sites. It allows to obtain an immediate quotation for our services.
- Different functions: Chat, Skype call, web callback, online meeting scheduling etc.

These sites are under the responsibility of the marketing department. The “Software & Applications” team of ISD had always provided technical support for the previous versions. For this new generation, we have used a different approach, for different reasons. We have chosen an OpenSource ECM platform with a view to optimizing multilingual content management and industrializing content management. As soon as the sites stopped being just a series of HTML pages or autonomous functions, we decided to build a team consisting of resources coming from the marketing and ISD departments: the Feature Team. This agile approach drawn from Lean Management / Scrum is opposed to “old” practices (which are still used, however) on “component teams” in which the project was divided according to capacities and responsibilities. In this type of organization, there is a team in which each member contributes his own added value. The objective is one and the same for all members: the success of the overall project, not just of the component project.

The objective of this organization was to rapidly develop the expected websites, avoiding to create a separation of responsibilities in which the ball would be passed from one member to another. It was also necessary for the management to get involved to an equal extent in order to ensure that tools, applications and contents were available for the desired period of time and thus better prepare the following stage. This is the moment when the marketing department would be able to autonomously operate the platform for content management.

This feature team consisted of between three and six people, depending on the phase of the project. In order to ensure a permanent follow-up, a daily meeting of between 10 and 15 minutes was organized in order to communicate on the tasks being processed, the tasks to come and current issues. The two (ISD and Marketing) managers participated in more than 96% of these meetings. The weekly meeting allowed to have a more precise follow-up, measured in figures, and to prepare the following tasks. Almost every quarter, we would organize a steering committee in order to present the progress as compared to our initial objectives.

In the end, after more than a year of using this organization and after making a transition in October:
- Despite the strong deadline pressures the team faced, it always remained united, without a single error being reported on any of the parties. The solutions were found together.
- The content integration practices/processes have already been implemented and tested; we didn’t start off with the “delivery”. We have yet to test work units for a maintenance mode, but the data we have already gathered allow us to have a solid basis.
- They know one another well. They will work again together in the future. They are familiar with the organization.
- The change management that would have been necessary for the marketing team would otherwise not have been as transparent as it has been here.
- All resources were allocated to the project for a period between 80 and 90% of the working time. This prevented them from losing contact with the daily activity of their departments. This is an important factor in ensuring transmission of information to the other team members.

What are the elements of success for this type of organization? They are not very different from other types: Involvement of the Management & Customer in the follow-up/monitoring, Choosing the right people (involved/competent) etc. What I would like to emphasize is, above all, the gain in information transmission which, in the end, translates into a smaller workload. This allows to have fewer unpleasant surprises at the moment of delivery in elements where discrepancies are too often noted and which cause irritation.

Can this type of organization be applied to all projects? The answer is obviously NO, although we could try to make it the standard type of organization. We intend to define a few criteria in order to facilitate the choice. The size of the project is one of the elements: when the project is too short, immersion is difficult when mutual knowledge is lacking. When the field of activity is complex, this becomes essential.

Personally, I believe in this approach, as it reduces the areas of incomprehension when the hierarchy is too strong (client / provider). This common work on immersion offers efficient and appealing solutions within the project and team members do not focus solely on their own tasks. I find it useful to continue organizing important information exchanges beyond the specifications phase.

[Episode 04] Reflection on the VDI