Intalio|Works » Demand Driven Development

Demand Driven Development (D3) is Intalio's process for allowing users, customers, and partners to prioritize and collectively fund the development of new product components and features. D3 was launched in 2006, and has since delivered over 25 projects, ranging from minor enhancements that took a few weeks to deliver, to major components that required multiple person-year of research & development, and cost over $1M.

Benefits of D3

D3 offers significant benefits to all participants in the Intalio ecosystem:

To Intalio customers, D3 brings the features they really care about, through a commercially supported product, on time, and for a fraction of the cost of an equivalent custom development.
To Intalio community users, D3 leverages their use cases and feedback to help define Intalio's product roadmap, and brings back useful features into the Community Edition and Enterprise Edition over time.
To Intalio implementation partners, D3 represents a formal, subsidized process to close the feature gap necessary to win client projects.
To Intalio itself, D3 helps the company more actively listen to the market, and reduce product management and development cost.

D3 is open to all community members. Join D3 now!

Community Product Management

Leveraging a discussion forum, registered members of the Intalio community website can provide feedback to feature requests from others, or submit ideas of their own. They can attach screenshots, sample projects, and storyboards to clarify their use cases and requirements.

Syndicated Sponsorship Model

The D3 syndicated sponsorship model is best illustrated using a concrete example. Suppose a company has modeled many business processes using Microsoft Visio before they discover Intalio. They would like to import those BPMN diagrams into Intalio|Works for implementation and deployment, instead of re-drawing all process models from scratch. They submit a D3 request for a Visio BPMN import utility.

Now, suppose another company also wants the same feature.

Finally, assume the Visio import utility program will take 2 person-months of engineering effort, and each person-month costs USD $5,000. Adding a 50% charge to cover the expected product maintenance cost over a 3-year period, the project's total cost is $15,000.

As a result, each sponsor's share is $7,500. Furthermore, sponsors are guaranteed to get the features that meets their requirements, on time, per the terms of the Statement of Work signed by Intalio and all participating sponsors.

D3 Pricing

D3 projects are priced based on actual development and maintenance costs, without any profit markups. The cost depends on the nature of the project:

For feature development (such as the previous Visio import example): one-time development costs, plus an additional 50% to account for the expected maintenance costs over a 3-year period.
For new platform certification (hardware, operating system, application server, database): one-time porting costs, plus certification costs for each future releases over a 3-year period.

The total cost also depends on the engineering resources required:

Intalio development partners located around the world (China, India, Ukraine) are preferred to help with cost control, scalability, and time to market.
Intalio core engineering is needed for projects that cannot be readily carried out by development partners due to dependencies and knowledge transfer time.

What D3 is Not

Demand Driven Development is not a for-profit endeavor for Intalio. All engineering efforts are priced at cost, with no profit margin. In fact, Intalio subsidizes D3 projects through a 50% reimbursement credit toward subscription fees for the first project sponsored by any new customer.

Demand Driven Development is not professional services. The D3 program is not meant to address client-specific customization or integration. Only general, reusable features and enhancements will be considered for D3, as they are rolled into Intalio's products for general adoption.

D3 Workflow

A simple web-based application is deployed on the Intalio community web site to track the D3 workflow. The lifecycle of a D3 feature request consists of six states, briefly described as follows:

1. Submitted. Anyone registered on the Intalio community site can submit a feature request. Submissions come from community users, customers, partners, or Intalio employees. Our D3 Program Manager will review each feature submission, and open a related topic for discussion in the D3 forum for any acceptable submission.

2. In Discussion. The community at large is invited to provide feedback on the feature request. The objective is to clarify use cases, and gauge community interest through open discussions and private email exchanges. The D3 Program Manager will also solicit input from Intalio's sales team and process experts. Features with clear use cases and sufficient community interest are moved to the Estimating state.

3. Estimating. An Intalio development partner will provide a high-level effort estimate based on available information. The D3 Program Manager will then calculate an engineering cost estimate for the project, and submit the project out for subscription on the D3 website.

4. Out for Subscription. Community users, customers, and partners interested in sponsoring a D3 project can do so directly on the D3 website, or send an email at d3@intalio.com. When sponsors are identified, the D3 Program Manager will revise effort estimates based on actual test cases submitted by sponsors, draft a Statement of Work with delivery schedule and acceptance criteria, and identify required engineering resources.

5. Project. This phase covers standard engineering delivery. Progress updates take place regularly using emails, teleconference, and web conferences. Product feedback is sought via frequent preview releases. Sponsors have access to a private defect tracking system to report problems and monitor progress, while high-level project status reports are made available to all other community users.

6. Completed. When all project sponsors and Intalio's quality assurance team sign off on project deliverables, the project is considered complete. It is later integrated into Intalio's mainstream product releases, usually within 3 to 6 months.

Sample Projects

The following are some of the projects that have been built and incorporated into Intalio|Works through Demand Driven Development. They serve to illustrate the range of projects that companies can leverage the D3 program for: