Scope this out
About the Author
Ben He also looks after most of our Australian training, so he's frequently found all over Australia on training missions, attending or hosting our live events, or just meeting up with our clients.
You can get in touch with Ben via our Contact page.
Hello everyone - sorry it’s been a bit long between drinks this time around, but we've been very busy here at StorMan. It’s been interesting to see a massive increase in training in the last two-and-a-half months. It is also gratifying to see that many of you recognise the benefits of having your staff trained and up-to-date on all the latest that StorMan has to offer.
New features always provide a boost in productivity for any business using StorMan, and the quickest way to see this increase in productivity is to ensure that your staff members know what they are doing. In discussing many of our new features with customers, there is always talk about what we are bringing to market next and how we go about deciding what to develop and what not to. So with this in mind, I have decided that today’s blog is going to be about how you as a StorMan customer can have your say about what goes into the software and the process involved.
Firstly, like all things, there needs to be an idea. In my travels, I am pleased to say that an exceeding large portion of you have great ideas for us but many of you fail to tell us because you think that we won’t listen to you, or perhaps that we may think the idea is silly.
But remember - our software is as good as it is because of the ideas and needs of our global customer base. For example, the 'Sales Inquiry' module that is now present in the StorMan Professional series was originally requested by a manager of a Storage King branch when I attended their annual conference back in 2006. Little less than a year later, that manager was able to see their ideas come to fruition. It’s important to understand that many of the features that we develop come directly from a user's need or want; after all we make our software to help you.
Secondly, once you have finalised your idea you need to tell us about it. This can be done a number of ways. You can ring, email or fax your ideas to us (see contact info), or you can chat to me or one of the other StorMan staff as they attend various meetings and conferences around the country over the year or alternatively when you attend your next StorMan training session.
Thirdly, once you have explained your idea then a StorMan staff member will add it to our system that tracks feature requests and assign it a number. Make sure you ask that you be advised what this number is, as it will allow us to track it through the system. Once the idea has been entered and assigned a number it is then discussed by our sales and development teams when they have their weekly development meetings. If we discuss an idea and think that it has merit then we will vote on whether to put that idea into the next and most important stage – scoping.
Fourthly, we "scope" an idea. This is generally the longest stage of the planning side of things because we need to sit down and tease out the idea to its fullest extent. For example, the idea about Sales Inquiries had to be looked at to see what we needed to include, did we need a quote form, should we be able to email that, can we attach a unit price to it, should there be a range of unit pricing and so on.
This really is the fun stage because the imagination can run wild at this point about what we could do. In essence, the scoping stage allows our development team to have a plan about what the new feature will do, how it will interact with the other portions of the software and how long it will take to actually write the code to make the feature.
Fifth on the list, is the task of coding the new feature. This involves our development team only although once they have developed an alpha build it is sent to various team members for internal testing only. This is an exciting part of our job because at this stage there are times when we are playing with ideas that no other software package has.
Once it has passed alpha testing a beta build is done and is released to our testing group for real life testing. This is an important stage of software development as we get to try the new feature in a range of testing environments.
Lastly, once the new feature has been tested and proved to work consistently and reliably we schedule that feature to be released in the next feature build. Many of you would be familiar with the little float-box in the top right hand of your screens however many of you may not know what the "version" number is actually for. Let's take a look via an example... StorMan version 7.2.16. The 7 stands for version 7, the 2 stands for the second feature release for this version, and the last number stands for the bug fix version.
So, there are times when we will finish a feature but have to sit it “on the shelf” until we are ready to deliver our next feature release. However this is part of how we make the software as this allows us to ramp up the relevant training programs and knowledgebase articles so that we can train you and you will get the most from your software package.
So if you’re sitting there in your chair thinking that it would be nice to 'have this' or 'have that' in the software, please get in touch with us as we are very interested in hearing what you want in your software. Remember we make this software for you, so it’s really in your best interests to tell us what you need to make your business make you money. We look forward to hearing from you soon!
Regards,
Ben (General Manager, StorMan Australia).
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