BambooRM™ - Bamboo’s First SaaS Application – Launched today
Published 01/28 courtesy of Bamboo Solutions CommunityHello Bamboo Community, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Steve DaRonco and I’m the Pre-Sales Technical Support Rep for Bamboo’s newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group. I hold an MCTS for SharePoint Administration and prior to joining Bamboo I had spent the last 12 years working in IT, with the last 5 years working as a SharePoint Administrator as well as consulting in and around the greater bay area deploying SharePoint as a solution. As both a SharePoint Administrator and as a consultant, I would often suggest Web Parts built by Bamboo to fill in where out-of-the-box deployments of WSS and MOSS would fall short. It didn’t take me long to determine that in many instances hiring additional consultants or further burdening your own internal development team to build custom solutions didn’t give many companies a high return of investment.
Bamboo’s newly formed Bamboo Online Applications Group has been tasked with leading Bamboo’s efforts in introducing predefined SaaS, Software as a Solution, business applications built on the SharePoint platform. I’m excited to announce that today we have launched our first product; a hosted requirements management application called BambooRM™.
What is Requirements Management?
Wikipedia defines it as: “The process of identifying, eliciting, documenting, analyzing, tracing, prioritizing and agreeing on requirements and then controlling change and communicating to relevant stakeholders. It is a continuous process throughout a project. A requirement is a capability to which a project outcome (product or service) should conform.”
Wow, try saying that fast 5 times…heck, try saying it slow twice! Basically, requirements management is a process put in place to ensure a project, whether it is product-based or service-based, meets all expectations throughout a development process.
The foundation of a successful requirements management is communication between members of the project team as well as stakeholders. Having the ability to communicate adjustments to requirements throughout the course of a project prevents one class of requirements from overriding another. This constant communication amongst all team members is critical. BambooRM™ enables its members to manage user requirements effectively as well as communicate and collaborate with geographically dispersed project team members, project stakeholders, and external consultants.
How will it help?
With BambooRM™ being a hosted environment there is no need to burden your IT Department with the cost and overhead associated with deploying and administering SharePoint. In addition you gain the ability to access a top notch requirements management application from anywhere, anytime, by as many team members as you want. BambooRM™ also offers the following key Features…
- Task Management - allows users to look at the allocated tasks. This view includes tasks that are assigned to the current user.
- Versioning - lets you maintain different versions of a project.
- Outline View - which provides a hierarchical view of the use cases, business and functional requirements as well as detailing the parent-child relationship.
- Shared Document - allows you to share documents between team members.
- Traceability - documents the life cycle of requirement and functions.
- Move Release to Release - the ability to migrate data from one release to another release.
- Download PDF/Word – enables you to download requirements in Word or PDF.
- Workflows - that are designed for use case, business, and functional requirement reviews.
- Bulk Import Wizard - allows you the ability to import data from various data sources.
- Discussion Items - enable document sharing among team members.
Five Minutes From Now Your Business Could Be Collaborating with SharePoint!
Setting up and accessing your corporate account takes minutes. Navigate to http://online.bamboosolutions.com/ and select the free trial button. Fill in the free trial signup form with a valid email address and agree to the service agreement.
You will receive an email acknowledging your request for a free trial with a link to BambooRM™. It should be noted that sometimes the email gets directed to your spam folder, so be sure to check there if you don’t receive the email within 5 minutes.
Once you access the email, simply click on the link and you will be directed to the corporate account provisioning page where our system provisions your company a corporate account. The whole process should take fewer than 5 minutes from email notification to account build out.
Now what?
Once your corporate account has been provisioned, you will be on your team’s “Home page”. From this point on, every time you log into BambooRM™ you will land on this page.
Let's take a look at the built-in Sample IT project. Once you click on the link you will be directed to the project “Dashboard page”. The dashboard page gives you a quick reference point for any and all data added to the project.
Requirements Management tab
This is the meat of BambooRM™ - it’s here where you create all the components for a successful project. You have an introduction to your project, opportunity analysis, functional group, functional requirements, your actors, your use cases and, of course, your business requirements.
Let’s click on the Business Requirements link.
Why don’t we take a look at the packaged sample site and look at one of the sample business requirements?
To create a business requirement you select New Item and input the necessary data. Including Title, description of your requirement, identify how difficult this requirement will be, the status of the requirement, the risk, who owns this particular requirement, the priority, estimated hours, parent reference and discussion items. Wait, discussion items? Yup, as I mentioned before, “constant communication amongst all team members is critical”. With BambooRM™ team members located anywhere have the ability to log in and either start a discussion or join in on a discussion. The cool thing is they then have the ability to associate their discussion with a Business requirement.
You’ll notice at the bottom of the discussion form that you have an area for associating business requirement, functional requirement, and use case. What happens if you aren’t sure of which business requirement it should be associated with. No problem, you can associate or edit all fields at anytime. I would also like to mention that you are not limited to associating one discussion per requirement.
What about Traceability?
We all know that traceability is essential in requirements management. BambooRM™ offers both forward and backward traceability. If you go to the traceability tab you have the ability to view Business to function, functional to use cases for forward traceability or you can view backward traceability use to case to functional requirement and functional to business requirement. The best part is this is automatically filled in as you add and associate data into your business requirements fields.
You’ll notice in the above screen shot that all of our parent business requirements get listed as well as all of their associated data. If you determine that a parent requirement has changed to a sub-requirement, all you need to do is edit that particular requirement and add a parent requirement. As soon as those edits are done, they will automatically be reflected on the traceability page.
The final thing I would like to point out is that you have the ability to generate reports. BambooRM™ comes with the ability to generate two types of reports. Business requirements and functional requirements, I would like to add that the reports are auto-populated. Meaning as you add information into your requirements, they are also automatically put into your report. You then have the ability to download a report in either Word or PDF format. You also have a third option of printing reports straight out of SharePoint.
Wrap up
I know this seemed a little long-winded but BambooRM™ is a significant tool with a lot of well thought out procedures that have been put in place to increase your team's ability to deliver their product or service projects on time, on scope and on budget.
Now you need to go to the free trial site register and start using it today. If you have any questions, or if you encounter any problems, please send your comments or issues to supportRM@bamboosolutions.com or salesrm@bamboosolutions.com.
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