Download or read book Eric Sink on the Business of Software written by Eric Sink and published by Apress. This book was released on 2006-12-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eric.Weblog() has 50,000 regular users; consistently included on the list of the most popular feeds in bloglines.com Sink founded a company that was named to the Inc 500 Book explains tough topics like marketing and hiring, in terms that programmers understand—all sprinkled with a touch of humor

Download or read book The Business of Software written by Michael A. Cusumano and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-03-15 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading expert on the global software industry reveals the inner working of software giants like IBM, Microsoft, and Netscape, and shows what it takes to create, develop, and manage a successful company--in good times and bad--in the most fiercely competitive business in the world.

Download or read book The Business Value of Software written by Michael D. S. Harris and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-09-01 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In business, driving value is a key strategy and typically starts at the top of an organization. In today’s digital age, driving software value is also an important, and often overlooked, key strategy. Executives, and the corporate board, need to expect the highest level of business value from the software the organization is developing, buying, and selling. In today’s digital transformation marketplace, it is imperative that organizations start driving business value from software development initiatives. For many years, the cost of software development challenged organizations with questions such as: How do we allocate software development costs? Should these costs be considered an overhead expense? Are we getting the most value possible for our investment? A fundamental problem has been built into these questions – the focus on cost. In almost every other part of the organization, maximizing profit or, in the case of a not-for-profit, maximizing the funds available, provides a clear focus with metrics to determine success or failure. In theory, simply aligning software spending with the maximizing profit goals should be sufficient to avoid any questions about value for money. Unfortunately, this alignment hasn’t turned out to be so simple, and the questions persist, particularly at the strategic or application portfolio level. In this book, Michael D.S. Harris describes how a software business value culture—one where all stakeholders, including technology and business—have a clear understanding of the goals and expected business value from software development. The book shows readers how they can transform software development from a cost or profit center to a business value center. Only a culture of software as a value center enables an organization to constantly maximize business value flow through software development. If your organization is starting to ask how it can change software from a cost-center to a value-center, this book is for you.

Download or read book Making the Software Business Case written by Donald J. Reifer and published by Pearson Education. This book was released on 2001-09-05 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Just the understanding and insights you will pick up about how people encounter and cope with combinations of technical, social, political, and economic opportunities and challenges make the book a joy to read and worth much more than the price of it alone." --Barry Boehm, from the Foreword This practical handbook shows you how to build an effective business case when you need to justify--and persuade management to accept--software change or improvement. Based on real-world scenarios, the book covers the most common situations in which business case analyses are required and explains specific techniques that have proved successful in practice. Drawing on years of experience in winning the "battle of the budget," the author shows you how to use commonly accepted engineering economic arguments to make your numbers "sing" to management. The book provides examples of successful business cases; along the way, tables, tools, facts, figures, and metrics guide you through the entire analytic process. Writing in a concise and witty style, the author makes this valuable guidance accessible to every software engineer, manager, and IT professional. Highlights include: How and where business case analyses fit into the software and IT life cycle process Explanations of the most common tools for business case analysis, such as present-value, return-on-investment, break-even, and cost/benefit calculation Tying the business process to the software development life cycle Packaging the business case for management consumption Frameworks and guidelines for justifying IT productivity, quality, and delivery cycle improvement strategies Case studies for applying appropriate decision situations to software process improvement Strategic guidelines for various business case analyses With this book in hand, you will find the facts, examples, hard data, and case studies needed for preparing your own winning business cases in today's complex software environment.

Download or read book Business Models in the Software Industry written by Markus Schief and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-05 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relevance of software business models has tremendously increased in recent years. Markus Schief explores opportunities to improve the management of these models. Based on a conceptual framework of software business model characteristics, he conducts large empirical studies to examine the current state of business models in the software industry. These data then serve as a foundation for statistical analyses of business models’ impact on firm and M&A performance. Finally, the author develops a software business model management tool.

Download or read book Sense and Respond written by Jeff Gothelf and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2017-02-07 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The End of Assembly Line Management We’re in the midst of a revolution. Quantum leaps in technology are enabling organizations to observe and measure people’s behavior in real time, communicate internally at extraordinary speed, and innovate continuously. These new, software-driven technologies are transforming the way companies interact with their customers, employees, and other stakeholders. This is no mere tech issue. The transformation requires a complete rethinking of the way we organize and manage work. And, as software becomes ever more integrated into every product and service, making this big shift is quickly becoming the key operational challenge for businesses of all kinds. We need a management model that doesn’t merely account for, but actually embraces, continuous change. Yet the truth is, most organizations continue to rely on outmoded, industrial-era operational models. They structure their teams, manage their people, and evolve their organizational cultures the way they always have. Now, organizations are emerging, and thriving, based on their capacity to sense and respond instantly to customer and employee behaviors. In Sense and Respond, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, leading tech experts and founders of the global Lean UX movement, vividly show how these companies operate, highlighting the new mindset and skills needed to lead and manage them—and to continuously innovate within them. In illuminating and instructive business examples, you’ll see organizations with distinctively new operating principles: shifting from managing outputs to what the authors call “outcome-focused management”; forming self-guided teams that can read and react to a fast-changing environment; creating a learning-all-the-time culture that can understand and respond to new customer behaviors and the data they generate; and finally, developing in everyone at the company the new universal skills of customer listening, assessment, and response. This engaging and practical book provides the crucial new operational and management model to help you and your organization win in a world of continuous change.

Download or read book Scaling a Software Business written by Brian Fitzgerald and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-08-23 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license. This book is intended primarily for practitioners who are facing the “softwareisation” of their business. It presents the Scaling Management Framework, a model based on collected experiences from companies that have already made the journey to give software a central role within the organization. The model is unique because it suggests a holistic method to analyze and plan your journey. It simply means that you can’t just focus solely on your products or services. You also have to look closely at your processes and your organization, the way you make decisions and get things done. Inevitably, these will have to change. Software has changed the rules of the game. The world talks about the digitalization in industry and society – how the focus has shifted from producing tangible things towards software and services. This trend started many years ago, but is now affecting every company, whether it’s a software company or not. There are many companies that have already made a digitalization journey – and many are about to embark on this journey – like you. How do you transform your organization when software is becoming a critical part of your business? This book comes with a map, a compass, and suggested journeys along with selected travel stories comprising best practices and lessons learned from past digitalization journeys. Use the map to find your way in the digitalization landscape, and use the compass to find the direction of your journey.

Download or read book Badass Making Users Awesome written by Kathy Sierra and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2015-01-29 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Note for ebook customers: The design and layout of this book play a key role in conveying the author's message. When creating the ebooks, we've tried to keep the look and feel of the print edition, but this means that not all e-reading devices will support the files. The EPUB format is optimized for iPad. The Mobi files are optimized for Kindle Fire tablets and phones and for Kindle reading apps. Imagine you’re in a game with one objective: a bestselling product or service. The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads. This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy. And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others? The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them. Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams. Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

Download or read book Discovering Real Business Requirements for Software Project Success written by Robin F. Goldsmith and published by Artech House. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While a number of books on the market deal with software requirements, this is the first resource to offer you a methodology for discovering and testing the real business requirements that software products must meet in order to provide value. The book provides you with practical techniques that help prevent the main causes of requirements creep, which in turn enhances software development success and satisfaction among the organizations that apply these approaches. Complementing discovery methods, you also learn more than 21 ways to test business requirements from the perspectives of assessing suitability of form, identifying overlooked requirements, and evaluating substance and content. The powerful techniques and methods presented are applied to a real business case from a company recognized for world-class excellence. You are introduced to the innovative Problem Pyramidtm technique which helps you more reliably identify the real problem and requirements content. From an examination of key methods for gathering and understanding information about requirements, to seven guidelines for documenting and communicating requirements, while avoiding analysis paralysis, this book is a comprehensive, single source for uncovering the real business requirements for your software development projects.

Download or read book Business Process Oriented Implementation of Standard Software written by Mathias Kirchmer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Here, the author, an SAP R/3 expert and president of a consulting firm, shows readers how companies can achieve strategic goals through business process oriented implementation of software such as SAP R/3, Oracle, or Peoplesoft. The updated second edition of this best-selling title will help managers and consultants understand the necessary methods and tools.

Download or read book Software Ecosystems written by Slinger Jansen and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the state-of-the-art of software ecosystems. It constitutes a fundamental step towards an empirically based, nuanced understanding of the implications for management, governance, and control of software ecosystems. This is the first book of its kind dedicated to this emerging field and offers guidelines on how to analyze software ecosystems; methods for managing and growing; methods on transitioning from a closed software organization to an open one; and instruments for dealing with open source, licensing issues, product management and app stores. It is unique in bringing together industry experiences, academic views and tackling challenges such as the definition of fundamental concepts of software ecosystems, describing those forces that influence its development and lifecycles, and the provision of methods for the governance of software ecosystems. This book is an essential starting point for software industry researchers, product managers, and entrepreneurs.

Download or read book Starting a Tech Business written by Alex Cowan and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2012-04-10 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The non-technical guide to building a booming tech-enabled business Thinking of starting a technology-enabled business? Or maybe you just want to increase your technology mojo so you can do your job better? You do not need to learn programming to participate in the development of today’s hottest technologies. But there are a few easy-to-grasp foundation concepts that will help you engage with a technical team. Starting a Tech Business explains in practical, actionable terms how to formulate and reality test new ideas package what you learn into frameworks that are highly actionable for engineers understand key foundation concepts about modern software and systems participate in an agile/lean development team as the ‘voice of the customer’ Even if you have a desire to learn to program (and I highly recommend doing whatever unlocks your ‘inner tinkerer’), these foundation concepts will help you target what exactly you want to understand about hands-on technology development. While a decade ago the barriers to creating a technology-enabled business required a pole vault, getting started today only requires a determined step in the right direction. Starting a Tech Business supplies the tools prospective entrepreneurs and business enterprises need to avoid common pitfalls and succeed in the fast-paced world of high-tech business. Successful execution requires thoughtful, evidence-based product formulation, well-articulated design, economic use of systems, adaptive management of technical resources, and empathetic deployment to customers. Starting a Tech Business offers practical checklists and frameworks that business owners, entrepreneurs, and professionals can apply to any tech-based business idea, whether you’re developing software and products or beginning a technology-enabled business. You’ll learn: 1. How to apply today’s leading management frameworks to a tech business 2. How to package your product idea in a way that’s highly actionable for your technical team 3. How to ask the right questions about technology selection and product architecture 4. Strategies to leverage what your technology ecosystem has to offer 5. How to carefully define the roles on your team, and then effectively evaluate candidates 6. The most common disconnects between engineers and business people and how to avoid them 7. How you can apply process design to your tech business without stifling creativity 8. The steps to avoid the most common pitfalls tech founders encounter Now is one of the best times to start a technology-enabled business, and anyone can do it with the right amount and kind of preparation. Starting a Tech Business shows you how to move a product idea to market quickly and inexpensively—and to tap into the stream of wealth that a tech business can provide.

Download or read book Fundamentals of Software Startups written by Anh Nguyen-Duc and published by Springer. This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses important topics for engineering and managing software startups, such as how technical and business aspects are related, which complications may arise and how they can be dealt with. It also addresses the use of scientific, engineering, and managerial approaches to successfully develop software products in startup companies. The book covers a wide range of software startup phenomena, and includes the knowledge, skills, and capabilities required for startup product development; team capacity and team roles; technical debt; minimal viable products; startup metrics; common pitfalls and patterns observed; as well as lessons learned from startups in Finland, Norway, Brazil, Russia and USA. All results are based on empirical findings, and the claims are backed by evidence and concrete observations, measurements and experiments from qualitative and quantitative research, as is common in empirical software engineering. The book helps entrepreneurs and practitioners to become aware of various phenomena, challenges, and practices that occur in real-world startups, and provides insights based on sound research methodologies presented in a simple and easy-to-read manner. It also allows students in business and engineering programs to learn about the important engineering concepts and technical building blocks of a software startup. It is also suitable for researchers at different levels in areas such as software and systems engineering, or information systems who are studying advanced topics related to software business.

Download or read book Japan s Software Factories written by Michael A. Cusumano and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991-05-16 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Japan has successfully competed with U.S. companies in the manufacturing and marketing of computer hardware, it has been less successful in developing computer programs. This book contains the first detailed analysis of how Japanese firms have tried to redress this imbalance by applying their skills in engineering and production management to software development. Cusumano focuses on the creation of "software factories" in which large numbers of people are engaged in developing software in cooperative ways--i.e. individual programs are not developed in isolation but rather utilize portions of other programs already developed whenever possible, and then yield usable portions for other programs being written. Devoting chapters to working methods at System Developing Corp., Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu, and including a comparison of Japanese and U.S. software factories, Cusumano's book will be important reading for all people involved in software and computer technology, as well as those interested in Japanese business and corporate culture.

Download or read book Product Roadmaps Relaunched written by C. Todd Lombardo and published by "O'Reilly Media, Inc.". This book was released on 2017-10-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A good product roadmap is one of the most important and influential documents an organization can develop, publish, and continuously update. In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy. This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product roadmap, and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you’ll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful. Whether you're a product manager, product owner, business analyst, program manager, project manager, scrum master, lead developer, designer, development manager, entrepreneur, or business owner, this book will show you how to: Articulate an inspiring vision and goals for your product Prioritize ruthlessly and scientifically Protect against pursuing seemingly good ideas without evaluation and prioritization Ensure alignment with stakeholders Inspire loyalty and over­-delivery from your team Get your sales team working with you instead of against you Bring a user­ and buyer-­centric approach to planning and decision-making Anticipate opportunities and stay ahead of the game Publish a comprehensive roadmap without over­committing

Download or read book Developer Hegemony written by Erik Dietrich and published by BlogIntoBook.com. This book was released on with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It’s been said that software is eating the planet. The modern economy—the world itself—relies on technology. Demand for the people who can produce it far outweighs the supply. So why do developers occupy largely subordinate roles in the corporate structure? Developer Hegemony explores the past, present, and future of the corporation and what it means for developers. While it outlines problems with the modern corporate structure, it’s ultimately a play-by-play of how to leave the corporate carnival and control your own destiny. And it’s an emboldening, specific vision of what software development looks like in the world of developer hegemony—one where developers band together into partner firms of “efficiencers,” finally able to command the pay, respect, and freedom that’s earned by solving problems no one else can. Developers, if you grow tired of being treated like geeks who can only be trusted to take orders and churn out code, consider this your call to arms. Bring about the autonomous future that’s rightfully yours. It’s time for developer hegemony.

Download or read book Demand Side Sales 101 written by Bob Moesta and published by . This book was released on 2020-09-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a lot of us, selling feels icky. Our stomachs tighten at the thought of reciting features and benefits, or pressuring customers into purchasing. It's really not our fault. We weren't taught how to sell, plus we've been sold before, leaving us with a bitter taste. Here's the truth: sales does not have to feel icky for you or your customers. In fact, with the right approach, sales can be an empowering experience for all. Bob Moesta, lifelong innovator and coarchitect of the "Jobs to be Done" theory, shares his approach for flipping the lens on sales. Bob shifts the focus of sales from selling, to helping people buy and make progress in their lives-demand-side sales.  Now, in Demand-Side Sales 101, you'll learn to really see what your customers see, hear what they hear, and understand what they mean. You'll not only be a more effective and innovative salesperson-you'll want to help people make progress.