This is post eleven of my coverage of the Serena Tag 2008 conference. It covers the keynote session of Carl Theobald, SVP of Products & Customer Service at Serena on Serena Agile at Your Service. Carl runs R&D for Serena and recently added responsibility for customer service. Serena wanted to align product development closer to customers needs. They also do cross training between the two groups. This makes the customer service people more knowledgeable about technical issues and the R&D people more knowledgeable about customer issues. It is a very smart move is also the reason for the session title.
I have seen the good results from such a move as I was involved in a similar cross-sharing between customer service and product innovation but it was with new food products. In 2000, Sainsbury's launched a business transformation program to move the UK supermarket chain toward a “faster, simpler, and together” approach to customer service. They also wanted to compete on innovation and brought in Jamie Oliver (see Building a Foundation for Innovation at Sainsbury's). Operating within a new enterprise portal infrastructure, Sainsbury’s created a series of functionally aligned knowledge management sub-portals in such areas as product development, call centers, retail stores, supply chain, etc. The product development group served as the pilot, starting an “Idea Bank.” This common infrastructure allowed for increased communication across functions to promote innovation, especially between customer service and product development. Mashups would make it so much easier to do now.
Carl next described the Serena product strategy. He first showed an American football play chart to counter the Brit theme of yesterday. Next was a global map as they do distributed application development. Serena makes global development teams more efficient and Carl mapped their process and tools across this map. Serena’s Dimensions and ZMF offer a single global instance of code for development teams. Serena mashups make business process more efficient, even in IT. Serena Mariner then provides a view into the big picture of projects. Serena’s Agile SaaS solution then makes development faster and more flexible. It is architected to work with distributed teams with built-in collaboration features. They have also integrated direct assistance and coaching through their partnership through their ValTech partnership.
We now saw a demo of Agile on OnDemand. It allows you to establish an effort, modify it, and make changes to meet changing needs. You can drag and drop these changes. Next we saw he how their Agile scum concept works. The scrum master came on stage in costume. He first looked into the Agile OnDemand dashboard to see if the team is in the cone of confidence and, if not, what adjustments need to be made, either on the product owner side or the development team side. The Agile team has daily 15 minute meetings to stay on track. If questions arise, Agile coaching help is available through the product with their partner, ValTech.
Carl said they use their own development tools. For example, they use Mariner OnDemand to keep track of internal development. You can get an overview of status and drill down to look at the details. Carl showed us his Mariner dashboard with live data on all the Serena products under development. He showed a mashup that visualizes status issues such as the backlog of defects. There is an escalation management feature, complete with request aging, to keep up with customer change requests. You can also see team velocity trends. Carl said he uses the Mariner tool daily. Everyone in Serena has a Mariner account so there is full transparency. This is a great move on their part as it leverages the enterprise 2.0 aspects of this tool.
Carl showed us an Apple iPhone to say his goal is the make Serena products both easy and fun. They want to be the “Apple” of application development. He said there is no reason for business software to be boring. For this reason they are re-designing their interfaces to be more intuitive.
Serena plans to take this concept of fun and ease-of-use further. They now have Mashup Exchange to help users get started by drawing on the work of others. Carl showed us a new interface under development in their R&D labs for Mashup Exchange that is very visual with tagging options and mouse overs. You can also rate the mashups, enterprise 2.0 style. This is a prototype of the type of interface they plan to go across other products.
Serena is making a major move into SaaS with three products: Mariner OnDemand was released in March; Mashups On Demand was released recently; and toward the end of the year there will be Agile On Demand. They are also focusing on increased customer service. We saw the new support web site. There are no login requirements, which got applause from the audience. The knowledge base is updated and expanded with better search. Over 35,000 new or updated documents have been created in the last twelve months. User profiles now reduce the need to repeat your context when you ask for help. You can also create enhancement requests more easily. Subscriptions to technical news are offered.
The new knowledge base has been out since May with 10,000 hits per month and a 94% success rate for self-service. This goes along with an 18% reduction is cases for help beyond self-service.
Carl said the road ahead will be largely determined by their customers. They have set up a booth for customers at the conference to record their requests.
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