Project Management challenges in Mobile Applications Delivery

                 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.