Even for Companies that dedicate their energy to building "standard" products, customers want customizations of the standard. They are willing to pay for them to get just what they want, quickly. So, all companies will be faced with the need to make custom projects beyond core product development. Saying to the customer, "Oh, you don't really need that", won't lead to a happy customer. Promising to deliver the feature in 3 months when the next release comes out won't work either. More often than not, the customer will be ahead of the curve making a request for features that should already be in the product, but aren't yet there. The need for custom projects occurs in all product spheres and spaces. The product company faces many thorny issues in answering these requests. We explore a few of these issues, listed below, in future posts.
- Finding the best Engagement model. Engagement model is just a fancy term describing the agreement between customer and provider about the manner in which products or services are to be delivered for a fee. Custom work needs to be executed under a special contract, a Professional Services agreement, which puts structure to the expectations for project. There are two "traditional" models: Fixed-price and Time & Materials projects. We propose a hybrid model, which addresses the significant shortcomings of both.
- Consequences for the product development, Organizational issues. Product teams dedicate themselves to advancing the standard product. For a number of reasons, this makes them distinctly inappropriate for developing fee-based modifications to the base. But the product team holds the core product expertise needed to be successful in creating enhancements to the standard. What are the key issues? How do we sort through them all?
- Team psychology and motivation. Custom product development is dedicated to quick changes meeting a narrow view of customer requirements. Core product teams thrive on answering questions about how the base can be extended to provide new functionalıty. How can this base be expanded upon in the future? (Like it or not, these are the real questions being addressed during design reviews.) How to resolve the conflict of the two world-views?
- Life-cycle issues. A company that performs custom development needs to have a coherent Product Management scheme. Also needed are a set of standards for managing the various kinds of projects undertaken. How do custom projects start, execute, and stop?
- Code baseline management. The interesting case is when custom projects modify existing code in the product baseline. How to manage this?
- Customer support. Companies developing products or services of any sort need to have Customer Support groups to help the customer with questions and problems. How do you go about providing support for custom development?
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