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Tag Archive for 'Delivery Model'

Buy the Car, Rent the Car or Take the Bus

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I found an interesting comment on LinkedIn from Chris Collins regarding the difference between On-Premise, On-Demand (Single-Tenant) and On-Demand (Multi-Tenant).  This is not the first time I hear or use the car rental versus car buying analogy, but I think it is well explained and I enjoyed the ‘bus’ example:

Here is one analogy that I use to demonstrate the concept of SaaS to non-technical audiences that always seems to get them understanding the basic idea. I tell them to imagine 2 cars and a bus.

BUY THE CAR: The first car they buy and pay for outright. They are responsible for all maintenance, insurance, gas. This is analagous to buying the hardware and traditionally licensing the software yourself in house. You as the buyer are very interested in the technology you are getting.

RENT THE CAR: The second car they rent by the month. You don’t own the car but you have some say over where the car goes and you are still somewhat interested in the technology. When you go the rental car parking lot, you have a choice of cars and your decision of which car to choose is somewhat based on technology. Also, one person rents one car. This is somewhat analagous to a traditional ASP model. The point is someone else might own it, but you are still interested in the technology underlying it.

TAKE THE BUS: The bus is multi-tenant. When the transmission (platform) is changed on the bus, every tenant is affected because they are riding on the same platform. BUT when you take the bus, unlike when you buy or rent a car, you are not as interested in the underlying technology but in what the bus can do for you. You are now looking primarily at the service aspect, what need can it fulfill for you? If you need to go to the mall and a bus arrives whose ticker says “Mall” on its route, then you take it for that reason, not because of the the transmission on the bus. You only pay for the cost to get to the mall, not by month or not the full cost of the bus.

However you can take the analogy a little further. If you are transporting precious cargo on the bus, you will of course want to make sure the bus is safe from hijackers while stopped and in transport just the same way customers still want to be sure their precious data is protected. If there is a particular transmission type that that is known to have holes in it and cargo sometimes falls out, the customer will want to know about that upfront.Then you risk losing the customer’s focus on the service and put it back on the technology. That is a very important concept.

Do you think this applies to a Sales Performance Management solution licensing model decision?

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6 Phases of the Sales Performance Management Delivery Model

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he SPM Delivery Model consists of 6 phases:
• Analyze
• Design
• Build
• Test
• Acceptance Test
• Deployment

SPM Delivery Model

SPM Delivery Model

Analyze Phase: The analyze phase consists of describing functional and non-functional requirements.  At the end of the implementation, we should be able to look at the system and confirm each requirement is met.

Design Phase: The design phase consist of planning how the system will meet the requirements.  The major deliverables include a functional design document (larger systems may have multiple such documents for each major component.  It will also consist of a solution design document, providing more details about the implementation.  This solution design should have “just enough” information.  Too little and the implementers will be left guessing and interpreting the design.  Too many details will cause the document to quickly become meaningless by not being kept up to date as the system evolves.  The design phase also includes planning the tests, and as I discussed before on this blog, to create test scenarios.

Build Phase: The build phase is repeated for each compensation plan, or for each major component which can stand alone and produce verifiable results.  Unlike a pure rapid prototyping methodology, it is a good idea to only start building when the requirements and design phases are well defined to ensure a strong design.  Unlike the waterfall model, this avoids a “big bang” approach, trying to integrate all plans at once over a long period of time and hoping everything will work.

Test Phase: Testing should be performed after every small build iteration, to ensure the use cases defined in the design phase work as expected.  This goes beyond unit testing and test multiple conditions and integration with previously developed plan.

Acceptance Test Phase: Once we are done developing and testing every plan, we are ready to put it all together and either load data from a previous month, or load the data with which we are going live.    This is where the stakeholders will agree and sign-off on the implementation.

Deploy: Go-live time!

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