All of us are aware that the façade of Mobility Application
development is being uncovered every day. New challenges are thrown from fast
evolving mobile devices and the corresponding capabilities offered by these
devices and underlying platforms to transform the way we think, the way we
operate small and big tasks. The umpteen number of possibilities of
applications and demand from customers and who in turn are enterprise users as
well, many niche start-ups as well as established Service providers willing to capture
the pie of huge Enterprise Mobility market ( predicted to be around 8 bn USD by
2016) are facing some unique challenges from Project Management perspective.
1.
Knowledge Management and training
owing to Short shelf-life of Technology
As the technology landscape and equilibrium shifts very fast e.g.
Blackberry and J2ME/Symbian enabled smart phones to iPhone to iPad to Android
with each operating system and MEAP platforms providing different APIs, SDKs to
develop the applications, companies need to keep a pool of resources to cater
to the demand of the enterprises and also always need to reskill the employees.
This reskilling poses other challenges like
a.
Better knowledge management framework
b.
Alignment with right Training providers or
Train-the-trainer program to cut costs on training of new technologies.
c.
Infrastructure and license setup for different
technologies
2.
Lack of historical metrics
There is hardly any baseline w.r.t. what should be the developer
productivity to create an application. This hurts in putting the right cost in
bidding process and there is a huge variance even when no product/platforms are
used. The equation becomes more complex as there are many MEAP platforms
available which claim to ease the job of the developers, but none of them are
fully complementary to the demand of enterprises. As the platforms mature, the
service providers are also trying to gather metrics on top of it, but it is
pretty inadequate at this moment to establish any correlation which poses a
challenge on the delivery as well as Sales team to price the end solutions.
3.
Mix of business process/domain
awareness coupled with technology
In Enterprise Mobility, the applications are developed to mobilize the
business processes belonging to each domain e.g. Banking and Financial Services,
Insurance , Manufacturing, Healthcare, Supply Chain Management, Media and
Telecom etc. Large enterprises have already aligned their delivery units also
according to these domains to cater to specific customer needs and have
developed specialized knowledge on them. As Mobility is evolving in terms of
technology, many organizations are forming Centre of Excellence in silos which
focuses on the development of the mobile technology, but the solutions
developed by them doesn’t attract customers as they deemed impractical after
hitting market due to lack of contribution from domain SMEs. So, few
organizations are thinking to move towards a Mobility CoE within each domain to
develop the right solution, but will there be a sufficient demand to cover the
cost separate setup? What’s the right and optimal way of operation is a
question management is trying to solve.
4.
Scale up to maintenance challenges
While the application/product providers might always argue that
the developers of the technology and applications will be able to support them
best, but in many practical cases I have found that the myth is not right. That’s
not because of neither of their unwillingness to support nor due to lack of
customer commitment, but arises of the fact of challenge to scale up and
prioritize. Quite often, maintenance activities and demands are ad-hoc and
niche companies cannot scale-up to these demands unless they have vendor
agreement with service provider companies and the training materials etc really
documented well. In this case, pure play service providers play a better role
when they have the “partnership” setup with the product providers. They have
the flexibility to move the people to other projects when the demand recedes.
5.
Optimizing the Operating Margin
The question "what's the optimal Operating Margin" haunts the VCs , the companies, the executives
everyone. While the project management team at the ground level demands a low
OM to start with as they need to build the reusable off-the shelf components, investments
due to training and infrastructure, for sponsors specially for public listed
companies, ROI is the key thing which drives. So, a clearly laid out business
plan is a must to survive the battle. Some VC promoted companies even operate
at zero to negative OM to garner initial customers and here there is a
challenge in front to established players to stay competitive. Obviously, the
other differentiators and value propositions, establishing TCO model comes
handy to combat this battle.
