What is SharePoint? For those of you living in a cave, SharePoint allows individuals within an organization to quickly and easily create and manage their own collaboration websites. Once SharePoint is part of your organization, there is no need to ever call IT for support or to set up permissions. Individuals are empowered to define and manage access to specific information. SharePoint is pretty slick and it is often overlooked as a project management tool.

I read the book because I believe most marketing failures can be traced back to failures of project management. I wanted to see how SharePoint could be used to quickly manage marketing projects and help my clients avoid marketing project failure.

Don’t get me wrong. There is no shortage of great project management tools. ProjectCompanion. Microsoft Project Server. Primavera. Basecamp. ProjectTurf.  But many people don’t know that they probably already have SharePoint running somewhere within their organization. When budgets are tight, leveraging technology that you already have can help stretch a strained budget.

I emailed Dux to get a better understanding of some of the essential capabilities marketing managers should look for when evaluating project management tools. His response was succinct:

·         Supports the generation of a project charter, schedule and budget

·         Facilitates communication and feedback

·         Monitors project activities

·         Controls project changes

·         Analyzes and forecasts project performance

·         Disseminates project status to relevant stakeholders

·         Provides real time information essential for initiating, planning, executing, controlling and closing a project

In response to my question: “When should a marketing manager start thinking about using a project management tool,” he responded:

1)      No standardized systems for integrating project goals: project schedule, cost and quality objectives are individual silos. For example, financial information in Excel is not automatically recalculated anytime the project schedule is adjusted. Making manual updates takes time away from other project activities.

2)      Inefficient document management: project documents are not stored in a central location. Tracking, undoing changes, and the ability to roll-back to prior versions are limited. Additionally, varying levels of access permissions are unavailable. IT/IS can only do so much in supporting information access requirements.

3)      Lack of appropriate tools to facilitate team collaboration: Project information is not accessible anytime, anywhere. In addition, the team is incapable of developing or working with information at the same time.

4)      Inability to report accurate and timely status of the project: project status information is only available whenever the project manager makes it available. How do you deal with project sponsors who want to view real time project status information?

5)      Not achieving organizational strategic goals: lacking a standardized tool to facilitate consistent project management processes throughout an organization can limit the ability to effectively support strategic goals.

Any marketing manager should quickly realize that these five issues alone more than justify the need for investment in reliable project management tools.  Dux’s book gives a deep dive for any marketing manager investigating how to use SharePoint to better manage his or her department. Pick it up at Amazon.

So why do marketing projects fail?

• Poor definition of project goals, role of marketing
• Overly complicated marketing objectives
• Marketing objectives not clearly defined and difficult or impossible to measure results
• Little-to-no accountability for results
• Not enough momentum

What this means, is that marketing projects fail when they are poorly defined, overly complex, lack measurement/accountability and take too long to execute.

When you improve these five factors (definition, simplicity, accountability, friction and speed) and you can’t help but improve results.

ONE – Define the Objectives. Many problems start with a poorly-defined plan. The plan should include program requirements (i.e., sales objectives) and potential limitations. These requirements are often referred to by project management experts as the project charter. After the plan is drafted, it should be reviewed and discussed by representatives from all departments that will be impacted by its execution in order to gain agreement and support. Only after you gather feedback should the plan be finalized.

TWO – Keep it Really Really Simple. Simplicity is related to “definition.” Simple means ease of measurement and clearly crafted objectives. Only when there is agreement on the program direction from the outset, can sales and marketing achieve a happy medium between innovative marketing and realistic sales goals.

THREE – Measurement/Accountability. Most marketers can’t tell which portion of their marketing budget contributes to sales. Ask these two questions to bring clarity to the way your organization measures results and holds the marketing program accountable: – How will the program be measured? (Will you measure hard results like the number of leads generated? Or soft results like the ability of a program to build market presence or penetrate a specific market? If you are measuring soft results, ask if these things can be accurately measured). Some frame success by winning accounts from the competition, increasing purchase volume within existing accounts and by preventing competitors from poaching your accounts. A simple objective that frames the entire marketing project portfolio (for example, all projects should improve lead flow and/or improve conversion of leads to sales) makes it easier to measure success. – If program tactics are not working (almost certainly will happen), how will the program be adapted? Is a strategy shift needed, or are different tactics needed? Link project success directly to the project owner’s compensation.

FOUR – Streamline and Remove the Friction Integrate your marketing into the sales process. Marketing and sales should be part of a seamless and integrated process. Marketing should be designed to generate prospects ready to take the next action in the sales process. The sales process should be designed to accept those same prospects. Walk through each step in both of these processees and identify all elements that may cause a customer to slow down, stop, become distracted, or heaven forbid… that most dangerous of customer activities… think. At each decision point remove percieved risks, insert rewards, make it an unnatural act not to move forward along the path you define. Re-engineer your internal sales engineering, administrative and contracting procedures to minimize delay and customer thinking. This is especially important if your sales are complex (if they involve “complex” products and services affecting multiple departments, longer sales cycles, multiple decision makers and/or senior management approval).

FIVE – Speed and Agility. Make decisions quickly. A decision not to proceed is better than no decision. A decision to kill the project frees you up to focus on other, more promising projects. Be ruthless. Kill non-starting projects quickly. Those you keep should start with tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals. Within a week after a product launch, for instance, there should already be results to evaluate and midcourse corrections arising from that evaluation.

If you aren’t making midcourse corrections, you are probably off course.

I believe SCRUM ideas should be embraced by marketers for project management.

In ControlChaos, they talk about a concept called ExtremeValue – “a business driven methodology for wringing every possible cent of value from your investments in product and systems projects. ExtremeValue differs from usual practices in that it causes functionality and value to be produced incrementally so value can be realized early and built upon, and business strategy prioritizes the sequence of functionality delivery so that the return on investment is maximized.”

What is most appealing about this concept from a marketing point of view is that it reduces risk. If the project is managed with incremental phases, it means that the investment is never greater than the cost of the increment. In otherwords, if you produce and measure the result of 30 day increments, your investment is never more than 30 days of effort.

As you learn and measure, you change direction and focus based on market feedback.

In the changing market, priorities and customers change. 30 day marketing priorities allow progress to measured rapidly — rather than waiting until requirements are finalized or plans are final.

This also means more clarity — as a marketing manager you now have direct visibility into the ongoing evolution of your marketing and you can now steer the process and make the right tradeoff’s between cost, time, quality, and functionality to deliver the most important impact as quickly as possible.

In each phase, we identify the biggest priorities that create the most value. Together, the sales and marketing team review how these priorities can be turned into progress that delivers value. The sales and marketing team then execute and review progress.

Decent article here about content and the “emerging role” of marketers as publishers. Like a magazine, marketers should start thinking about their editorial calendar and pushing a new edition out every month to their customers and salesforce.

The only measurement that matters is measurement that truly shows how effective you are at reaching your customers.

Traditional B2B marketing measurement is especially tough because anything you do impacts everything else you do. How does your PR impact your PPC? How does your PPC impact your SEO? How does your SEO impact your website? How does your website impact your direct mail? And vice versa, and so on.

In looking at various measurement methodologies, it seems few actually demonstrate a measureable connection between the multiple activities that define true multi-channel B2B marketing and the sales pipeline.

Finally, as a last insult to simplicity, the measurement methods you use for your company will have little bearing on the measurement someone else uses for their company. In B2B marketing and sales, benchmarks and best practices are hard to find. Everyone measures and values certain tactics differently. My media mix and your media mix are not the same. Your sales approach and my sales approach are not the same.

So what to do?

First, don’t sweat it.

No matter how trivial or important the tactic, assign it a key performance indicator (a KPI).

A KPI is a quantifiable measurement, agreed to beforehand, that reflects the critical success factors of a certain tactic. The KPI for your website’s performance may be the unique visitors or the number of inquiries or any other metric that is important to you. The KPI for your media relations activities might be press mentions or advertising equivalency. Whatever the KPI, it should be binary. This means, at the end of each month, you should know if you achieved or did not achieve your KPI. If your KPI for your website is 1000 unique visitors per month, then you know with certainty at the end of the month whether or not you achieved your web KPI. Likewise, if your monthly public relations KPI is 4 or more mentions about your company every 30 day period, you know with certainty whether or not you achieved your KPI.

Next, if you have 10 tactics and 10 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 10 score with 10 being most important and 1 being least important. If you have 104 tactics and 104 KPIs, force rank every KPI on a 1 to 104 score with 104 being most important. This ranking forces you to think about the importance of each of your tactics as part of your total media mix. If your SEO is a the most important tactic in your arsenal of 10 tactics, SEO gets a weight of 10. If PR is the next most important tactic, PR gets a weight of 9. And so on.

For every 30 day period, honestly evaluate whether or not you achieved the goal for each KPI. If you achieved the goal, give yourself a score of 1. If you did not achieve your goal, give yourself a score of 0. There is no negotiation. You either achieved the KPI or you didn’t.

Multiply each of your KPI scores by your force ranked weight. In the SEO example above, if you achieved your SEO KPI, multiply the tactic’s weighted score of 10 by 1. If you did not achieve your PR score, multiply the weighted score of 9 by 0. Work your way through all your tactics and determine whether or not you achieved your KPI. Add all these sums together. See the table below for an example:

If you have 10 tactics, you have a total possible score of 55 (10+9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=55)

When you add all the scores in the table above and divide them by the potential score, you have a grade of 60%. Next month, try to improve your grade.

Is this an exact science? No. Far from it.

But the exercise of measuring forces you to define the things that you value. It also forces your team to reach an understanding of the metrics that are expected from each piece of creative or from each tactic you produce.

If the measurement is not working or if you are measuring things you don’t value, you quickly recognize it. You adapt. Wash. Rinse. Refine. Repeat. And so on until you settle on a definition of the things that matter most.

Finally, your measurement lets you compare your marketing performance to your sales pipeline. This is where your measurement really matters. What happens to the sales pipeline if you adjust certain tactics? What happens when you start measuring things differently? The sales pipeline is the true indicator of marketing success. If you measure a marketing tactic and it provides no insight into the overall health of the sales pipeline, does it matter? Absolutely not.

Is all this extra effort worth it? Absolutely.

NOTE: If you’d like a copy of the spreadsheet referenced above, email me at bbradley @ bradleywiltjer . com

Carnegie Mellon’s Software Engineering Institute developed the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) as a way to explain the evolutionary processes software development organizations adopt in the process of becoming world-class. CMM describes an organization’s software development processes relative to benchmarks and best practices. A maturity model provides a roadmap to best practices, a shared language and a way to prioritize process improvement projects.

CMM defines “levels” or steps of maturity through which an organization must pass in order to achieve the next level of process improvement. A CMM process is a defined path of improvement that helps organizations that want to increase their software process capability. It is a path of improvement going through several levels of maturity.

This Technology Marketing CMM (TM-CMM) has a primary objective—improve the marketing department’s capability to perform marketing activities through automation and other process improvements especially in the marketing operations arena. It represents a path from disorganized, chaotic, and inconsistently performed practices to mature processes that elevate marketing effectiveness.

Improving marketing operations effectiveness requires more planning and forecasting, better performance management and consistent execution of best-practices. These are skills that are different from softskills of creative and strategy. These skills are becoming more important as marketing evolves into operational and metrics-based processes. These marketing functions easily map to CMM efforts.

By stealing liberally from software CMM efforts and writings, we can begin by saying that TM-CMM is simply a framework that will guide organizations in selecting high priority process improvement actions based on the current maturity of their marketing processes and practices.

I’ll be posting to this topic in the coming days and may need your feedback and/or your willingness to help me design a self-assessment survey that we can use to benchmark.

So we started working with a Six Sigma black belt consultant a few weeks ago.

Our question…how can we apply Six Sigma-like processes to the process of marketing to and engaging with clients? How can we apply lessons from Six Sigma as a formalized process for engaging with customers on multiple levels. Can we look at the client engagement process under the lense of Six Sigma?

The first question…when and why do client engagements go wrong? We grouped our own experiences and also some of the experiences of a few of our clients into a collective bucket.

Overwhelmingly, client engagements go south when expectations are not properly documented. This is true in marketing professional services, this is true in marketing widgets.

Managing expectations is most difficult because often the buyer of professionl services does not have a clear idea of what they want and need.

Expectations are also way too optimistic, too complicated, poorly defined, and are impossible to measure.

So the sales process then becomes a process of definition. Sales engagements need to move clients forward in their own decision-making process.

Some of the take-aways from the Six Sigma consultant were quite simple — the biggest one boils down to people. Better project definition is attained by attention to very simplistic and what may seem like naïve rules:

Definition: as a starting point, what problem are we solving? Have we designed a project to solve the problem? How quickly can we solve the problem? Take one problem at a time. Start with discrete “blocks” of tightly defined projects framed with expected results, start/finish dates and clear ROI goals.

Ownership: Who owns the project? Is the success of the project tied to their compensation? What is the intended result? Starting with the sales force, where is the most friction? Involve the customer in a recurring evaluation of the accuracy and relevance of the current message, pitch and offer.

Measurement: How will this program make money? How will we measure it? Success equals sales.

Action: Are we making decisions quickly? A decision not to proceed is better than no decision.

Quick turn around: All projects are executed and completed in discrete timeframes not to exceed 4 weeks. Each time intervals represents a small iterative milestones. Large problems are broken into smaller pieces.

Demonstrate and communicate progress: After every project, there is something to see, touch, and evaluate. There is “stuff” that is useful and measureable and working (or not working). This happens during the project, not after the project. This helps keep the project on track, on target, and on budget.

Everything is a test: Test early and test often.

Everything changes. Get used to it.

BRADLEY: Tell us a little about your background.

CABLE: Well, I have a degree in English Literature, which gave me a good classical education, but I went directly from Beowulf into business. I’ve started and sold a few businesses — everything from rehabbing single-family homes on spec to opening a 12,000 square foot bar near Wrigley Field. I eventually went back to school, attending evening classes and earning an MBA from DePaul University, and began looking for an established business to acquire. Having started from scratch a few times, I decided to reduce my risk and purchase a going concern. I came across American Science & Surplus. It was a perfect match for me. I’ve been a science geek for as long as I can remember, and I was interested in catalog marketing. After 13 months of negotiation, I purchased the business.

BRADLEY: What about the company?

American Science & Surplus was established in about 1937. At that time the founder, Mr. Al Luebbers, was working for Western Electric, here in Chicago. Al had a great interest in optics and he noticed that a company next door to the plant where he worked was throwing away reject lenses. He asked them if he could buy the rejects and they said, “No. But you can have them if you will haul them away.” Al and his wife Buddy took the lenses, cleaned and polished them at their kitchen table in the evenings and decided to offer them for sale. They placed an ad in Popular Science offering ten lenses for 50¢ and began to receive orders. Al figured that if they changed the ad to “Ten Lenses for $1″ people would think they were better lenses and buy more. So he did. And they did. And the business was launched as American Lens & Photo.

After the Second World War the company expanded, fed by war surplus. Eventually, Al opened a regular store on Chicago’s Northwest side called American Science Center and started carrying educational science items.
In the 1970′s Al & Buddy’s son Jerry joined his parents in the business, eventually taking it over from them. In 1979 he started a catalog operation under the name “Jerryco” and in 1981 he opened a second store, in Milwaukee.

In 1988 Jerry took in a partner, Scott McCausland, who bought out the Luebbers after Jerry’s unfortunate death a short time later. After consolidating all operations under the name American Science & Surplus, he started the first web site in 1995. In late 1999 he completely rebuilt the web site and started taking on line orders. In 2000 McCausland retired and sold American Science & Surplus to me.

BRADLEY: What do you like most about running the company?

CABLE: What I like most about American Science & Surplus is that we are fascinated by discovery and invention. And we are dedicated to having fun along the way.

We supply a wide range of unusual and hard to find items (some say bizarre stuff) to the hobbiest, tinkerer, artist, experimenter, home educator, do-it-yourselfer, and bargain hunter.

Customers have used American Science and Surplus items in home made cars, sculptures, precision instruments, home made telescopes, costumes, model railroads, window dressings, holiday decorations, and innumerable science projects. Our items are great gifts, inexpensive supplies, and an endless reason for a giggle or a “Gee whiz!” We try to be scrupulously honest in presenting whatever we know about what we have, and always take it back, no questions asked, if the customer isn’t satisfied with it.

BRADLEY: What was your worst mistake?

CABLE: I’ve made my share of mistakes, as you do when learning different businesses, but my worst was IT related. I made a decision eight months ago that had serious consequences, and I’m still working through them. Our company is largely run by an integrated computer program that handles everything from order management and inventory control to campaign management and accounting. The firm that wrote our old software had gone out of business back in the ’80s and it was time to migrate to a new system. I did extensive research, studying the various packages available, sitting through demos, visiting end users. I felt I had done my due diligence. Although it was the most expensive choice, I selected a package that was considered the leader in the field, with the largest installed customer base. Our data conversion and implementation went great. Only after the software was up and running for a week did I find that it had an incredible number of bugs. It turns out that we went live on the latest version of the product – the new “upgrade.” The end-users I had interviewed all had the older, more stable version of the product. I failed to anticipate the enormous number of bugs that could be introduced in a new version. One expects some glitches, of course, but this was ridiculous. Had we gone live a few months earlier, we would not have had this issue — unfortunate timing, to say the least.

BRADLEY: How did you fix it and what advice do you have for others in similar situations?

CABLE: The first thing we did, the most important thing, was to quickly develop workarounds to insulate customers from the problems. I brought in an outside programmer to help me with some of the workarounds. All customer-facing issues were given the highest priority. And I’ve been working with the vendor, of course, identifying and documenting problems so that they can devote their programming resources to fixing them.

I never doubted my abilities, but you do have to be realistic about what you’re capable of doing. It’s important to know what you don’t know. Software can be especially frustrating for me, because I am not a programmer. I feel that so much is out of my control. It’s not like an operations issue. Then I can go out to the warehouse and redesign a process or move some racking around, and feel that I’ve made a difference. Besides, I have great people working with me and I bring in additional brainpower when needed, so I’m confident about my overall ability to run a successful business.

If I could do it all over again, I would demand that we be brought live on a proven version of the product. I failed to adequately research the timing of the update and its possible repercussions.

We really felt we had done our due diligence in selecting this software. Our research was exhaustive. Our timeline left plenty of room for the unexpected. We had a detailed, realistic conversion and implementation plan. Despite this, the project went poorly.

As for advice, it goes without saying that you should ask every question you can imagine, but I’d suggest they also seek out a disinterested expert in the field — maybe a couple of them — and find out what they would ask, and what would be important to them. And I’d suggest that a business owner, or anyone, balance being on the cutting edge of any technology against the dependability of using a proven product. Sometimes that edge is necessary. The trick is knowing when it’s necessary, and when it’s a liability.

BRADLEY: What was the impact of this mistake on your business?

The impact was, and still is, enormous. Not only did I have to deal with getting my people up to speed on the new software package, I also had to deal with the bugs. I assumed that many of the issues we were having were our fault. I thought we had problems because we weren’t familiar with the program, because we weren’t using it properly. It took us a while to figure out that the program was broken; it was not operator error. The functionality was not there.

One of the bugs affected mailing list. I discovered that we were not mailing catalogs to all the customers who should have been receiving them. This had a very significant adverse affect on sales. Had it continued, it could have sunk the company. It certainly upset many customers. Some of these customer relationships are reparable, some are not. It will take months, if not years, to fully recover from this.

BRADLEY: What advice would you give to others about growing their businesses?

CABLE: My company was established over 60 years ago. Growing a mature business such as this is a real challenge. The low hanging fruit was picked long ago.

It’s important to actually budget time to think about the big picture. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed by day-to-day operations. Reserve time to meet with your top people, and plan specifically to discuss large, strategic issues.

Identify the parts of your business that are growing and concentrate on those. Don’t focus only on your best product or best customer, neither of which may have room for growth. Your best product or line today may not be your best five years from now.

Also, when you decide to reengineer a process in your business, make sure you are reengineering the right process. You could have the best invoice-reconciling process in the industry, but is that going to grow your business, or increase your profit margin? Is it really worth the effort and investment? Effective process design is important, but selecting the right process to design is most important.

Ben Bradley is the managing director of GrowingCo, Inc. and The Bradley Group. Do you have a question or topic you would like Ben to address in an upcoming column? Please send your comments to ben@benbradley.net.

Some background…

Starting as an independent consultant in 1994 and with no outside funding, Joe Gorup built Catavo (www.catavo.com) into a multi-million dollar consulting firm that has survived both the ups and the downs of the economy. Mr. Gorup’s background includes extensive experience in large-scale application development projects.

GROWINGCO: What was your biggest technology mistake?

GORUP: For our customers, we have a always delivered what we said we would, so externally there are no “big mistakes.” Internally, we’re like every other company. Clients always come first. Clients don’t want to see pain and we don’t show it to them. Internally, we have our own challenges and we have made many mistakes. One mistake was a tactical mistake – an internal technology project that went wrong. It was a case of not taking our own advice and resulted in 2 months of delay and frustrated users.

GROWINGCO: Tell us more about not taking your own advice?

GORUP: This mistake centered on our attempts to rollout an internal project management & time tracking application. We had done this dozens of times for clients. We understood that time and project management is a critical business function (it drives our invoicing process) and changing it carries some risk. For clients, we would diagram the business processes and identify the critical path for the implementation.

GROWINGCO: What do you mean when you say “critical path.”

GORUP: The critical path is the individual tasks that directly impact the overall timeline for accomplishing an entire project. Collectively, these “tasks” make up the “critical path”. When we know the critical path, we have a clear picture of what needed to be done, how it would get done and we would have buy-in from all the business process owners. For example, at the start of a housing project – the action of “Pouring the foundation” would initially be on the critical path and the “purchase door frames” would NOT be on the critical path. Once the foundation was poured and the house framed the “purchase door frames” tasks would be on the critical path. The entire house project would be on hold (e.g. could not drywall, etc.) if the door frames were not purchased, hence the “critical path”.

Sadly, our mistake was not taking our own advice and finding the critical path. Our mistake was attempting to implement all features of the new software before proving how the critical path items would fit into our business. We became enamored with all of the new features (e.g. web-based real-time data warehouse reporting), and in the process of playing with all of the possible bells and whistles, put the software into such a state that it required us to completely start over and rebuild. Aside from the time wasted and inefficiencies, we missed our year-end go live date, and confused/frustrated staff that were helping out in our initial “beta” rollout because they had to “re-enter” their time…again.

The problem is that people have a hard time finding the critical path and focus on what is fun, interesting, or “easy”. In complex systems/projects, it can be challenging to determine precisely what these tasks are. Making things more challenging is the fact that as the project progresses, the task that is on the critical path changes.

Data warehouse reporting was clearly not critical to implementing the project but it was “neat”. Venturing into this land de-railed the entire project.

GROWINGCO: How did you fix it and what did you learn from it?

GORUP: We applied our own consulting advice to ourselves. Specifically, we went back and identified the critical path elements of the software; specifically, what is minimally needed to collect, report, and invoice for our time. Once we had identified these key features, we also confirmed a backup and recovery strategy so that we can restore the application if we ever have a major issue again. It reinforced the reason why we give the advise we do and that even the brightest technologists need a plan and a process to be successful.

GROWINGCO: What is your advice for people designing business processes?

Do not buy, install, or set expectations based on the features of a given technology. One should focus on the business process(es) first, then apply the software to specifically meet/enhance these processes. Technology can almost do anything, the question is NOT what it COULD do; the question is what SHOULD it do.

GROWINGCO: In hindsight, how would you have done it differently?

GORUP: We thought we were above the law. We use the phrase the “physics of application development” to point out that there are absolutes and real science and process to technology implementations (it is not just “art”) and to project management in general. Oftentimes budgets or time constraints make us think the short cuts are better. We tried to “break the laws of technology physics” – we tried to turn an ice cube (new software) into steam (finished product), skipping the “water phase” – it does not work.

CONTACT

Ben Bradley
Managing Director
GrowingCo, Inc.
ben @ growingco.com
Direct: 630-221-9844

Most participants (generally ranging from technical project managers to CIOs) classified their embedded systems programming initiatives as critical to business functions rather than supporting business functions, and said the goal of their projects was to rapidly introduce customers to smarter devices and tool sets.

None of the respondents said that essential resources were being diverted from embedded programming projects to other priorities or short-term operational support, suggesting that CIO’s consider embedded systems projects “critical product development” rather than infrastructure support — a point of growing importance as most of the interviewed companies begin to make plans for supporting business growth programs as economic prospects brighten.

The potential link between developing an embedded systems competence and business growth is further suggested by Marketing’s growing involvement in the embedded software development process. While a minority of the respondents said that Marketing requirements were driving the development process, Marketing was directly involved in more than 75% of the cases.

That fact that embedded systems programming is still an emerging practice area is underscored by the majority of respondents indicating their reliance on outside specialists for development skills.

A large percentage said they were still actively seeking external expertise and tools, strongly indicating that understanding of embedded systems capabilities are still unevenly understood within the enterprise and that embedded projects (especially in companies with strong marketing teams) have yet to be codified into formal practice recommendations to IT management.

For additional information about this study, please consult GrowingCo, Inc. by visiting http://www.growingco.com or by emailing admin@growingco.com.

ABOUT GROWINGCO

GrowingCo, Inc. is an advisory firm — a trusted provider and facilitator of peer-driven intelligence, insight and interaction. GrowingCo study, forum participants and sponsors use GrowingCo data, forums, surveys and white papers to benchmark against peers and competitors, evaluate demand drivers and understand individual customer requirements.

CONTACT

Ben Bradley
Managing Director
GrowingCo, Inc.
ben @ growingco.com
Direct: 630-221-9844