Road Map

[Kelvin]

Do you guys have a published road map. I am being asked to set our internal plan based on your road map.

[Gerry]

Hi Kelvin,

We don't publish a roadmap because our development effort is fluid and driven largely by customer need.  In reality, when doing continuous deployment things get done quite quickly and as a result things can change change almost daily so of we tried to commit any kind of forward plan beyond 90 day execution we could be penning ourselves into a corner and removing our ability to be agile.  We do of course have running themes, and we do have a general strategic direction when it comes to under-the-hood architecture type development but we look at these as themes rather than a "roadmap" in the more traditional sense. 

For example, one of the current themes is looking at a broader spectrum of integration capability, that is plugging into other systems (both cloud and on-premise) for the purpose of automating IT, this is a very high level theme which is currently driving both under-the-hood technology developments, BPM changes as well as plugging into other integration and orchestration tools. Another is expanding some of the less demanded ITIL capabilities around release management and integration with change management, and yet another is around knowledge management and there are yet others - but in 90 days time these will be done and a new set of themes that drive our efforts will have emerged. 

When delivering on-premise software we always needed to provide a clear (as best we could)  date bound roadmap in order to allow our customers to plan/align their upgrade cycles/projects with our roadmap.  With our cloud platform there is no need for upgrade projects because we keep everything up to date and do not make changes that break what you already have running. 

Can you expand a little on what you are trying to get to?  Are there specific things you need from Hornbill that are currently available that is having an impact on your ability to move forwards?

Gerry

 

[Henrik Brattlie, Manag-E]

As you already know, I'm a big fan of your way of working with themes and continuous deployment, @Gerry. Nontheless, I'd like to know how the theme of operator knowledge is coming along? Will it be a data driven approach, where knowledge is automatically presented to operators based on the tickets they are currently working on?

[Gerry]

@Henrik Brattlie, Manag-E

No problem, I will need to get someone from the Service Manager development team to expand on what we are doing in this regard, I am not sure where we are with it or what the exact approach is going to be, but yes I believe (please dont hold me to this) that it will be a data driven approach as you describe. 

Gerry

[Steven Boardman]

@Henrik Brattlie, Manag-E

In regards to the operator knowledge capabilities, our next step here is to provide the operator and or the customer some data driven knowledge at the point they are raising requests, and in Hornbill this equates to having knowledge available to you in Progressive Capture.

When either a customer or support person is raising a request, knowledge in the form of FAQs, Published Problems and Known Error's etc will be presented as they work through progressive capture, using information from progressive capture to narrow down the search results.
For example if a Service is selected, then the available results will be narrowed to knowledge linked to that Service.

We are due to start this particular feature shortly, i will update back here once this is in progress..

Steve