Blueprint Tackles Excessive Rate Of Software Project Failures
Software platform designed to shrink wide “collaboration gap” between business and IT
Blueprint, the market leading requirements software provider, recently unveiled its newest weapon to help companies grapple with software development challenges that leave a third of approved software projects cancelled. Blueprint’s Requirements Definition and Management Platform is designed to reduce the “collaboration gap” between business and IT by providing a unified approach to defining business requirements, then offering a systematic process to manage requirements through to completion. In turn, organizations deliver major revenue-generating business applications faster, with less cost and risk, and with greater end-user adoption.
“Complex software projects in the past spanned months if not years before reaching end users—this is simply not acceptable in a world that is web-enabled, mobile and increasingly social,” says David Nyland, President & CEO of Blueprint. “Software remains key to competitiveness. But inadequate collaboration between business strategists and IT teams remains a long-standing and chronic problem that we have proven can be solved by changing the way software is developed.”
Nyland says IT is often blamed, but they are left stretched by “reworking” projects in which business requirements weren’t properly defined at the outset, causing time and cost overruns. In the past decade two other factors exacerbated the problem—extensive global merger and acquisition activity along with a trend towards outsourcing to reduce costs. So instead of software development scattered between floors or campuses, the collaboration gap can stretch across continents and time zones.
“Over the past decade or so, organizations grew increasingly worried about the problems that took root in bad requirements,” writes Tom Grant, Senior Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc. “That's the change of mindset that has put requirements at the top of the list of priorities and made the people responsible for requirements willing to invest in new practices and tools."
Blueprint’s unified platform closes this gap, enabling a business analyst to work with business and IT to define and translate various business requirements into a systematic process that supports collaboration, validation and enables all parties to model and visualize software as it is developed. Over the past five years, more than 200 customers — including major Fortune 500 banks, insurance companies, retailers, pharmaceutical companies and government agencies — have improved collaboration between their business and IT teams using Blueprint’s patented requirements visualization and social features. Customer best practices and insights from Blueprint’s Global 2000 customer base inform many new features of the platform.
“Blueprint’s new platform enables our team to effectively achieve certainty in the requirements elaboration and validation process, which, we believe, will ultimately reduce costly rework and increase the quality of deliverables being handed to our design team,” said Kan Zhu, Senior Manager at Teranet. “Blueprint’s new collaboration, social interaction, and online review features allow us to visualize outcomes collectively, enabling everyone to efficiently participate in the requirements process without the need for multiple, time-consuming requirements review meetings.”
About the New Platform Architecture
Blueprint has introduced a new web-centric architecture including an Microsoft Office-like rich internet application accessible through a browser, and a cloud based requirements repository residing either in a customer’s own private cloud or in Blueprint’s secure 24x7x365 hosted data center. Blueprint’s architecture allows for secure authentication and role-based project access across a diverse range of Blueprint users, including business analysts, IT and business review and approval stakeholders, as well as downstream project management, development, and QA teams.
Key advancements in the new platform include its intuitive Microsoft Office-like user interface, public and private cloud-based access, extended definition and visualization vocabulary, online stakeholder review and approval, and social commenting and discussions. For more information, visit http://www.blueprintsys.com/saveyourprojects/
About Blueprint
Blueprint is the world leader in collaborative requirements definition and management solutions for companies looking to improve the success of critical revenue-generating projects. Blueprint transforms the business-IT relationship into a visual and engaging collaboration, enabling a unified approach that results in on-time, and on-budget applications. Predictable project schedules combined with faster time-to-market is critical to the competitive success of Blueprint’s Global 2000 customers. Headquartered in Toronto, Blueprint has global sales, operations and partner presence. For more information, visit http://www.blueprintsys.com.
SOURCE: Blueprint