| Spring 2002 |
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Board of Directors Meets With PTC Executives
Software Quality, New Product Strategy Highlighted Each November, the PTC/USER Board of Directors meets with PTC® senior managers to discuss the top concerns of the user community. These sessions provide an opportunity to bring the most pressing user issues to the immediate attention of key decisionmakers. The agenda for our most recent meeting reflects the many new and ongoing challenges faced in 2001. Software Quality Of foremost concern to the user community and the PTC/USER Board of Directors are PTC’s efforts to improve software quality. PTC believes it can foster a culture of continuous process improvement within its software development group. This means moving to a model where organizational processes operate to drive enhancements to products and services. This proactive strategy relies on developing customer partnerships, ensuring adequate staff coverage for the product set, modernizing internal communications, instituting process refinements and discipline, and establishing personal accountability for quality. A number of near- and long-term initiatives in support of these critical objectives are already under way. In particular, PTC has
Attracting and retaining talented personnel is essential to the success of any software quality improvement strategy, and PTC’s aggressive attention to attrition has dramatically reduced staff losses. In fact, PTC has added 54 quality assurance engineers, co-located with worldwide development staff. Furthermore, Michael Brook has joined PTC as the new head of MCAD Development. In his previous endeavors, Michael founded a company that specialized in tools enabling software engineers to assess quality levels prior to release. It is hoped that his expertise will give a boost to PTC’s quality improvement efforts. Other PTC organizations are jumping on the bandwagon. In cooperation with the Software Development group, Technical Support is examining ways to improve customer communications. Potential approaches include the use of online conferencing tools to resolve user issues. Deployment of new technologies will improve PTC’s ability to reproduce customer problems, leading to better solutions and quicker response times. PTC Software Development is also teaming up with Technical Support to work from one software performance report (SPR) list that incorporates both customer and internal reports. In addition, PTC will enforce strict adherence to milestones and submission criteria. Development projects that don’t meet freeze dates for a release will be cut and rescheduled. While PTC is making good progress, it is clear that much work remains to ensure consistent, high-quality releases. In a recent letter to Dick Harrison, PTC’s President and CEO, the Board raised questions about the company’s efforts to deploy the Software Engineering Institute’s Capability Maturity Model (CMM) and to use appropriate metrics to measure progress toward achieving quality objectives. The Board and PTC management are now working jointly to focus attention on software quality. Product Strategy and Vision PTC is embarking on a bold strategy to redefine product development in the same way that Pro/ENGINEER revolutionized solid modeling. Jim Heppelmann, Chief Technology Officer, wants to bring together all elements of the supply chain. His vision is to enable engineering, manufacturing, suppliers and customers alike to work together using the same digital representation of the product. Driven by the results of customer satisfaction surveys, PTC is moving to improve the quality of Pro/ENGINEER modules and their integration with Windchill components. PTC software will represent the full spectrum of solutions meeting the product development needs of today and tomorrow. The scope of these solutions is staked out by three primary objectives: create, collaborate, and control.
Solutions may of course address one or more of these objectives rather than align neatly under a single category. PTC’s “Wildfire” project will meld the capabilities of Pro/ENGINEER and Windchill to create a synergistic, comprehensive solution to the demands of product development. Ultimately, PTC will supply all the tools to take customers from initial concept to finished product. The next major release of Pro/ENGINEER, due out later in 2002, will introduce some of Wildfire's capabilities. The most promising feature of the Wildfire project is the incorporation of Internet technologies and a web browser into Pro/ENGINEER. Instead of performing design operations within a browser, users will access network resources and communicate with their peers seamlessly within the CAD environment. Internet Explorer will be embedded in Windows NT products; Netscape Navigator will be the browser on other platforms. These tools will leverage PTC’s advantages in capturing intellectual property and enabling collaboration. Major improvements in usability are also available in the upcoming release of Pro/ENGINEER. These enhancements will be especially noticeable in the area of feature creation, where the user interface has been completely revamped. The next Pro/ENGINEER release also offers built-in tutorials that incorporate video instruction on the use of particular functions. The new online release notes provide a glimpse of how these tutorials work. The PTC/USER World Event conferences to be held in Berlin, Atlanta and Tokyo will showcase the premiere of the new Pro/ENGINEER release. More details are available at www.prouser.org/2002. Many users have been concerned about the longevity of Pro/INTRALINK®. While this product will live on indefinitely, no major functionality changes are envisioned after Version 3.0. As PTC’s data management solutions evolve, they will eventually surpass the capabilities of Pro/INTRALINK. |
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