Telelogic Helps Enterprises Manage Change

fact sheet

Vendor: IBM Corporation (www.ibm.com)

Vendor's Information:
About Telelogic Change
About IBM Corporation

The only constant in business is change. How your development organization responds to change determines what value you bring to the business and whether you help the business get ahead or fall behind the competition. You have to manage change efficiently and effectively to help reduce complexity and cost and increase responsiveness. Add to this the challenges of managing large distributed teams and the tactical needs of the business and change can be overwhelming.

Efficient workflow processes, best practices and increasing productivity are all needed to help reduce costs and create quality applications. Stakeholders need to feel that they are getting a high return on investment which means they have to be an integral part of the development process. The only way this can happen is with a robust, comprehensive change management framework that is intuitive to the end-user, easy to deploy, and cost effective to maintain, such as what you'll find in Telelogic Change. Let's look at the benefits of IBM's enterprise change management solution.

Bringing Your Organization Together
A comprehensive change management solution helps bring your organization together by integrating disparate sources of change data into a consistent, reliable open environment. This allows all stakeholders insight into the process that lets them know whether or not their needs are being served and lets developers know what their priorities are. By having a well defined enterprise change process (ECP) everyone has a stake in insuring your development organization is delivering business value. Telelogic Change allows you to easily define and publish that process.

Designing a Process That Meets Your Needs
While an ECP is omnipresent, it has to be both tailored to your organization's processes, and it should also follow the same hierarchical structure your organization uses to manage work. Telelogic Change allows for the process to adapt to your structure, not the other way around. The terminology it uses should be familiar to the principal users and provide secure, role-based access as well as a privilege mechanism that allows you flexibility to formalize shortcuts.

Standards and Compliance
An enterprise change management platform includes key functionality specifically designed to directly address standards and compliance issues. Both your process framework and its associated standards and governance procedures need to tie in with your organizational objectives and business goals. For example, enterprise change management can support capability maturity model integration (CMMI) and Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE) compliance by providing for project scheduling, effort estimation, causal analysis, and process enforcement. Telelogic Change supports both these standards to insure your processes are in compliance.

Achieving Acceptance by Providing the Best Usability
Having proven usability criteria is necessary for successful deployment of an enterprise change management process. For example, it could have options such as effort progress bars, dynamically generated process help, auto-generated lifecycle views with drag and drop capability, interactive visualizations, and more. Putting the information users need at their fingertips, when they need it should be the ultimate guiding factor.

Reporting and Metrics: Keys to Tracking Your Progress
Informing users of the status and timeline of projects is key to its success. The enterprise change management framework provides users and managers with real-time views into the status of projects so they can make informed choices. These metrics support historical trend analysis, traceability and prioritization capabilities to assist in critical decision making and to understand the impact of any change request. Telelogic Change provides the actionable information you need, when you need it with powerful change management reporting capabilities, including traceability, trend analysis, metrics and graphs.

Harnessing the Power of ALM
When integrated with IBM solutions for Application Lifecycle Management, an enterprise change management framework harnesses the benefits of establishing traceability from project planning and user requirements to design, all the way to Software Configuration Management (SCM) and test management. It serves as the central pathway that helps provide an efficient and systematic approach to development, resulting in higher quality products and faster time-to-market.

Supporting Complex, Scalable Workflow Scenarios
Scalability for the ECP is necessary to allow it to work with both small (including Agile) to large, distributed teams. As such, it must provide you with rich transition and state capabilities, parent-child relationships, propagation policies, attribute definitions, and multiple levels of decomposition that are contextually aware. It will also have adequate notification mechanisms to ensure efficient collaboration. With Telelogic Change, you get real-time change management and availability regardless of the size or location of your teams. As a web-based change management solution, Telelogic Change gives you a change management infrastructure that will keep your development efforts ahead of the game.

This article was originally adapted from IBM's To the Point Guide entitled "How an Enterprise Change Management Solution Can Help You Control Change Across the Development Lifecycle and Throughout the Enterprise"