Better Online Solutions

Implementing TOC - An Open Letter

BOS (Better Online Solutions) is a producer of connectivity solutions for IBM midrange computer's environments. Not unlike many others companies which develop software, we always have faced difficulties in trying to keep up with the development schedules.

The market we are active in is dynamic and changing all the time. Solutions which are right for today can turn in no time into obsolete (and thus unattractive).

To reach the end of the projects at BOS, it often took twice the amount of time relatively to our estimates. And of course, when the project is finally supplied - it's often too late for the market, which requests always a new and newer solutions. Even worse, the competitors come into the market with their own solutions, and succeeded in capturing a big part of it.

But the impact wasn't only external; being always late fundamentally destroyed the company's time-estimate system. All the functions which were supposed to provide estimates of the time needed to execute their part of the action, added an extra security time to their original estimates. It brought us into the absurd situation at which even the smallest of projects grew into a lengthy enterprises. What was even worse - the managers (not only the programmers) became a part of this absurd game. As a result - we couldn't keep up with the schedules and the estimates were proved wrong time after time.

The change came right after two of us - the company's managers - participated in the Jonah^SM Course; we were so impressed with what was achieved there that we decided to apply TOC at our project management. We have hold a dedicated Project Management course at our premises. It was week-long and some 17 odd people took part in it, including most of the project managers of the company, the development VP as well as the president of the company.

It wasn't simple; during the course many of the participants resisted the suggested ideas. Their rational was simple - the ideas presented might be beneficial in some environments, but software development was clearly different. So the ideas were exposed and discussed in depth by the course instructors. The development VP succeeded in solving some of the more logistical problems during the course.

But that wasn't enough to answer the resistance from the participants, resistance stemming from their deep conviction that creative process of software development can't be dealt with the proposed project management tools. It necessitated a team work of the course instructors, the company managers (and some of the project managers) - to show that from the theoretical point of view software project can be dealt using the TOC approach.

To test this point, the course participants' decided to apply it to a major, large, and most important - critical for company's future project. They created a plan and a schedule of its execution, that will satisfy the market needs and the management requests. It was a project that was originally planned to be released to the market in August 1997 (there is no reason to believe that it will be on time - but who knows?). The TOC scheduling cut four months from this time-table - so it was planned to be ready on May 1, 1997. It was finished in beginning of April, 1997. Almost month before the corrected time. Almost five months before the original time.

I would like to mention that in spite of the team working in a much shorter time-span than what we were used to, they didn't work under any more pressure than in other projects, the mistakes level was low and the quality of the written code was high. All the people involved in this project received a bonus - something we routinely don't do - due to their huge success.

What we do now is to have all our software development projects executed according to TOC principles - and this time (unlike when we did it for the first time) I feel very confident.

Izzy Gal - President of BOS
Tel (+972) 4 999 0333
Fax (+972) 4 999 0334
igal@boscom.com