ECCU, a full-service financial institution and banking resource for churches, Christian schools, missionaries, and other evangelical ministries, selected WT to both streamline their new account opening process and improve their existing IVR.
Online Enrollment & Account Opening
Waterfield’s Online Enrollment & Account Opening solution allows ECCU customers to open and fund new accounts in a simple online process, turning the online environment into a highly profitable sales channel. Built upon Outsystems .NET Agile Development Platform, WT’s solution includes industry-leading risk management, reporting, compliance, and configurability, as well as initial funding via transfers over the ACH network. The new solution provides ECCU with a secure, convenient method to serve their growing membership base within the US as well as missionaries serving throughout the world.
WT’s solution features real-time integration with FIS/eFunds ID Verification to protect against identity fraud and comply with the PATRIOT Act Section 326, 314 (a) and OFAC regulations. In addition to verification, the solution also validates, verifies and authenticates an applicant’s identity at new account opening with ID Authentication. Incorporating all aspects of the membership enrollment and account opening process into one solution, will allow ECCU and members to instantly open and fund new accounts.
IVR
WT was also selected to upgrade, service, and make modifications to ECCU’s existing IVR. WT upgraded ECCU to the most current Convergys/Edify Voice Interaction Platform (EVIP). The new solution provides customers with anytime, anywhere access to account information. WT also built a development environment for ECCU to ensure all changes and modifications are throughly approved and tested prior to deploying in a production environment.
About ECCU
ECCU is the banking resource for churches, Christian schools, and other evangelical ministries nationwide. They also serve missionaries in more than 100 countries around the world. While its business focus is providing financial services to evangelical organizations, the credit union does provide personal banking services such as savings and checking accounts to individual members and their families. For more than 45 years ECCU’s members and employees have shared a commitment to the mission of making evangelical Christian ministries more effective.
OutSystems’ Award Program Recognizes Latest Agile Application Projects Delivered On Time, On Budget and With 100 Percent User Adoption
SAN RAMON, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–OutSystems:
OutSystems, provider of the industry-leading Agile Platform application development environment, announced today three new winners of the Outsystems’ Agility Award, recognizing accomplishments for projects that were delivered following an Agile process and exhibited real business benefit.
The winning companies are Waterfield Technologies, TNT Express and their systems integrator COOLProfs, and Turismo de Portugal and their systems integrator Normatica.
The Agility Award program was launched at the end of May 2009. The awards are submission-based and recognize teams and organizations who have fully embraced Agile methodologies and iterative, user-oriented development to deliver application projects on time, on budget and with 100 percent user adoption.
In the spirit of Agile, the Agility Awards will be given on an on-going, monthly basis. For a list of all award winners visit http://www.outsystems.com/goto/agilityaward.
Agility Award Winning Projects and Supporting Quotes
Waterfield Technologies, Online Banking Real Time Account Creation & Funding Project: Waterfield Technologies used the OutSystems Agile Platform to develop an application for the real time collection, vetting, funding and opening of accounts for a bank, credit union or other financial services provider. The system interfaces with five external databases and systems for immediate online processing of bank accounts as a result of online or direct mail marketing. The application allows the bank to quickly convert interested prospects into bank customers by simplifying the traditional application process used by many banks which often results in hours of offline processing and review and days of customer delay. Delivered in 12 weeks in 4 sprints.
“Utilizing OutSystems’ Agile Platform and the agile methodology allowed a broader range of participants from the bank’s perspective to be involved in the development process, thereby creating a more effective application once it reached production. Being able to rapidly respond to unforeseen obstacles and the rapidly evolving fraud landscape was essential in the development of this system. Our ability to continue to evolve the application and respond to business change is a testament to the overall effectiveness of the Agile Platform.” – John Marino, President of Waterfield Technologies
TNT Express and their systems integrator, COOLProfs, for the GARD project: The GARD project provides a structured working environment that streamlines and enhances business retention and the development of TNT’s portfolio of global customers. GARD will play a key role in securing TNT’s Global Accounts revenue, which accounts for around 20 percent of the total TNT Express revenue. GARD will also ensure that the global resource pool of contract managers shares best practices and focuses its efforts on the most important issues. Delivered in 7 weeks in 3 sprints.
“The Agile methodology, employed by COOLProfs to build GARD, allowed they system’s key stakeholders, Contract Managers at TNT Global Account Management, to fully participate in the development of a tool which enables them to pool their extensive knowledge and experience towards supporting the key business processes; facilitating account retention and development.” – Hugo Koppelaars, solutions and commercial global account management director at TNT Express.
Turismo de Portugal and their systems integrator, Normatica, for the School Management System project: The SIMPLEX School Management System is a next generation school management solution providing an interactive community portal for stakeholders (management, administration, teachers and students) to enhance the efficiency of school administration and improve resource optimization. The platform covers a school’s diverse operations including Student Management, Class Management, Trainer Management, Course Management, School Facility Management, Meal Plan Management, Scholarship Management and Student Application Management. Delivered in 20 weeks in 6 sprints.
“The agile methodology has enabled great stakeholder alignment and has reduced the traditional distrust that exists in technology projects following a waterfall model. The new School Platform has simplified the administration processes at 17 different Schools of Hospitality and Tourism allowing the staff to focus on excellent education.” – Hugo Sousa, IT Director at Turismo de Portugal.
OutSystems Supporting Quote
“This quarter’s winning applications show the speed and agility that can be obtained using the Agile Platform,” said Mike Jones, agile evangelist and vice president of marketing at OutSystems.
About OutSystems
OutSystems’ Agile Platform is used by IT teams around the world to rapidly develop and manage flexible web applications and business processes using agile methodologies. The integrated platform unifies the two life-cycles of application development and business process management within a single, powerful environment—enabling the automation of business processes and delivery of flexible web applications that are built for continuous change.
Companies use the Agile Platform to integrate, develop, deploy, monitor and change web apps and business processes—delivering business value in weeks rather than months or years.
Introduced in 2001, with over 6,500 installations, OutSystems’ Agile Platform has been honored with multiple CODiE and JOLT awards and is supported by an active community of more than 1,700 developers, 500 certified practitioners and over 50 implementation partners. Its free Community Edition is also available at http://www.outsystems.com/download.
OutSystems announced the latest release of their 5.0 Agile platform last week.
Here’s the post from their blog regarding the release, its new features and some of the product details.
Give us a call to schedule a demo of the software or let us know if we can help you get a version downloaded and setup in your environment, at no cost!
From OutSystems.com:
In this version we’re taking agile a step further; not only are we supporting the entire application lifecycle management for web applications, we also added support for IT teams to rapidly develop business processes using agile methodologies.
Traditionally, business process development was done at a different pace using different tools than IT used for application development. However, one of the biggest challenges facing the business process world is the integration of business processes with applications; which meant one of them was always waiting for the other. And, in the case of our customers who already use the Agile Platform, web application development was happening faster than business processes development.
With version 5.0 of the Agile Platform, we have closed that gap! Using the new Business Process Technology capabilities of the platform, IT teams can develop business processes totally integrated with web applications in an agile manner. All artifacts that the Agile Platform provides for Web Application development – like TrueChange technology, 1 Click-Publishing, Real Time Monitoring, and so on – are also available for business process development.
To develop this new capability, the OutSystems R&D team partnered with one of our customers, Van Ameyde, to design and implement this capability. Van Ameyde uses business processes intensively for insurance claims processing and has very heavy change demands for those processes. Customer participation has been key to the development of the new 5.0 functionality, and we believe that it led to a pragmatic implementation of Business Process Technology that will allow IT teams to fulfill the needs of the business from a process perspective, as fast as they have been doing for web applications with the Agile Platform.
Along with Business Process Technology, version 5.0 includes many other improvements that will make developers a lot more productive. If you’re already using the Agile Platform, check the videos of some of the improvements we made to the platform. If you want to give it a try for yourself, the best thing to do is download the (free) Community Edition and try out the new capabilities of the platform.
Great post from OutSystems regarding the use of Agile and Scrum in the application development of Fly.com.
The post summarizes a recent webcast from Max Rayner the CTO of TravelZoo.
Travel Zoo is travel publisher with 18 million subscribers and fly.com is an online app that helps you find the exact match to your air travel needs. During the webcast Max discussed the problem space, their agile approach, the innovative metasearch engine, how they managed a distributed team, challenges, key learnings and reasons for their success.
At the core, we are often asked about using Agile in “real world” scenarios. The thinking behind the question is likely based on the presumption that Agile works best for internal, low volume applications. Its great to see TravelZoo and Fly.com see so much success with the approach and the software tool.
The full, original post is located here.
OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, announces a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in.OutSystems, a provider of agile software development tools, has announced a new, free Agile Platform Community Edition of its solution to give developers an easy way to create Web business applications and use agile techniques without any vendor lock-in, the company said.
OutSystems said its Agile Platform Community Edition is a full version of the company’s Agile Platform that can be deployed into production for personal use or by small businesses with up to five concurrent end users. OutSystems announced its new release at the Agile 2009 Conference in Chicago on Aug. 24.
“The Agile Platform offers developers an end-to-end solution for the delivery of Web business applications that overcomes the development, delivery and change issues faced by enterprise IT shops when trying to apply agile methods,” said Mike Jones, vice president of marketing at OutSystems. “We anticipate that the Community Edition will lead to a grass roots growth in loyal users of the Agile Platform and eventually new customers.”
OutSystems’ Agile Platform is a unified solution, based on agile methodologies, that addresses the full life cycle of delivering and managing Web applications. It can be used to integrate existing systems, compose and automatically deploy new applications, manage them centrally and drive change during their entire life cycle, the company said.
The new Community Edition provides a small download footprint, a simple installation process, a getting started guide and sample applications. OutSystems also is making available a series of getting started tutorials to explore the Agile Platform’s capabilities for delivering rich Internet applications.
“OutSystems makes agile much easier, but it is important for developers to play around with the platform and discover it for themselves,” said Stefan Meier, associate director of software development at XDx, in a statement. “The Agile Platform Community Edition provides this opportunity, and we can’t wait for more developers to try it and build awareness of how software/IT staff and their business customers can benefit together from the improved communication process, time-savings and cost-effectiveness provided by the Agile Platform.”
In a blog post that supports the OutSystems strategy in releasing its Community Edition, Forrester Research analyst John Rymer said:
“Developers consistently tell us they want unrestricted platform downloads—no time bombs, no forced contacts with the vendor’s sales staff, no limited-function versions. … We thought in this era of open source, everyone understood this point about developer downloads. Downloads are a great way to encourage developers to learn your product’s ins, outs, values, and issues. But developers learn at their own pace, not on your schedule. Developers need your whole product because they will follow a variety of paths to knowledge, not just the paths that make sense to you. And developers don’t want to listen to a sales rep’s pitch on the wonders of your software. Let your code do the convincing instead.”
OutSystems®, provider of the industry-leading Agile Platform, today announced that leading analyst firm Butler Group recently released a new Technology Audit report that highly recommends OutSystems’ Agile Platform (OAP) for companies across industries seeking versatility and fast turn-around, especially when faced with rapidly changing business requirements or long project backlogs and limited in-house resources.
Butler Group’s Technology Audit on OutSystems concluded, “Butler Group believes that most businesses can benefit from using OAP in their IT development projects. When coupled with the suitability of the tool within an Agile way of development, this makes the offering from OutSystems a persuasive proposition.”
Butler Group highlighted the Agile Platform’s ability to considerably reduce the problem of bridging the IT and business cultural divides since “the degree of automation in OAP raises the level of business-aware personnel who can be trained to use the system and develop applications far closer to the heart of business requirements than with traditional software development teams.”
Butler Group also agrees with the OutSystems claim “that most significant benefits will be realised in the form of reduced application maintenance costs.”
Butler Group also wrote that the Agile Platform’s ability to target either .NET or Java from one single application is attractive to businesses with heterogeneous environments, creating the flexibility and freedom for specialized business logic or components deployment that doesn’t restrict organizations by the automated system.
Click below to download the complete PDF.
butlergroup-outsystems-agileplatform42-ta001682adt
A study conducted by Atos Origin measuring the productivity of OutSystems’ Agile Platform shows that OutSystems is 22% cheaper for Agile software development. With 
OutSystems, the study delivered equal levels of quality in a shorter time period even with an increased workload.
The original blog post was in dutch but lots of request came from other languages to translate this blog, that is why the original blog by Hans ten Berge is translated here.
This study measured the productivity of a project executed by Atos Origin for one of its customers using OutSystems’ Agile Platform against the productivity of other Agile projects at Atos Origin; non-agile projects implemented in 4GL languages; as well as projects in a global Quantitative Software Management (QSM) database.
This is a great article for anyone interested in the efficiencies of Agile and the differentiation within.
Click here to read the full article.
June 15, 2009 — The notion of agile development by now is well known for most every responsible CEO and CIO. With the economy stuck in low gear, organizations need to find ways to shorten development cycles and improve quality, all with the resources they already have on hand.
The Agile Manifesto, which spells out the ideas and practices for its implementation, was written in 2001, and in the eight ensuing years, many organizations have taken the first steps toward agile development. By now, many have had successful projects done by designated agile teams and have realized the cost savings and time-to-market benefits that agile espouses.
Now, these organizations want to reap bigger benefits by bringing agile out of its silos and into a wide deployment, across geographical locations, time zones and language barriers. Yet among the Manifesto’s 12 core principles are that “the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation,” and “business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” And there’s the one about “individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”
Those principles would almost seem to inhibit the adoption of agile processes in a large, distributed development organization. So how do organizations scale their agile practices to get a bigger payback?
Not to scale?
Robert Holler, CEO of agile project management software maker VersionOne, took a step back to answer that question. “There are challenges with scale. The problem’s not unique to agile or to software development,” he said. “Scaling is just tough. Sometimes agile gets a black eye for not scaling, but it’s more like, ‘Development doesn’t scale.’”
And Paul Hodgetts, lead consultant at Agile Logic, said that planning before embarking down the agile path is critical.
“There’s no way to get a big organization behind something like this without first thinking it through,” he said. “‘Why are we doing this? How will we get everyone on board?’ You must show them a way to get from point A to point B that won’t make their lives miserable for the next 12–18 months.”
Too often, he said, organizations fail and blame it on the methodology. “They say, ‘We tried to implement agile, but we didn’t plan or learn about it, so it didn’t work, so agile sucks.’”
Holler agreed that the foundation for agile must be built before adoption can be successful. Among the factors organizations need to assess are whether the educational base to scale already exists. If the answer is no, the organization must decide if it is willing to bring in the expertise. “If not, it’s an impediment,” he said.
“People say, ‘We want to scale but we don’t want to invest’ in education. That won’t work. [Education] is a fundamental tenet of success.”
Another fundamental issue for enterprise-wide agile development is buy-in. If you can’t get everyone in the organization to agree with the approach, success will be impossible to achieve, said Hodgetts.
“Agile is hard and it takes a lot of commitment,” he said. “Every enterprise implementation I’ve seen is a roller-coaster ride. They implement it in one team, see some productivity improvements, better quality software, and then that the people are happy. But when they try to bring it wider, they stir things up—maybe they move people off the successful teams to coach newer people—and they might actually lose productivity for a time.
“As an enterprise, you’ve got to be prepared to live through a number of cycles like that.”
In practical terms, though, scaling across a large, distributed organization poses several challenges. The tried-and-true methods of developing in pairs in the same room, and using a whiteboard at daily standup meetings, or even having those meetings, don’t carry over to teams that are geographically dispersed and working on an around-the-world, 24-hour schedule.
Enter the tools
The original 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto were mostly consultants and developers; as a result, the notion of small, co-located teams doing pair programming and constantly engaging the customer were top of mind. To go with this, a number of excellent point solutions were created for continuous integration, for functional and acceptance testing, and for managing change.
But these solutions optimize parts that can be leveraged by small teams, leaving organizations to do a lot of toolsmithing to integrate the pieces into an enterprise-scale solution, according to Scott Ambler, the practice leader for agile development at IBM.
“The overarching platform has to provide value for developers, or they won’t use it,” he said. “Continuous integration is great. Testing is great. But they’re having to do a lot of toolsmithing to make it work.”
On a management level, automated metrics offer tremendous value, he said. “Manual metrics is a lot of wasted effort. You need a coherent metrics program in place or you’ll have problems adopting agile in a meaningful way.”
IBM’s Rational Team Concert provides an integrated tool set for the agile life cycle, Ambler said. Rational Requirements Composer offers lightweight agile modeling; Quality Manager tackles usability and security issues while managing parallel testing efforts; AppScan—though not yet based on IBM’s Jazz technology—offers security testing for Web-based applications; and Software Analyzer is a static code analyzer that keeps agilists more focused on quality.
Ambler acknowledged there are “some great open-source tools” out there, but at the end of the day, “we see team after team spending so much time on integration. They should be developing applications for their own organization. Doing all this toolsmithing is not a great use of their time.”
Tools should not lock a user into a particular discipline, cautioned Ryan Martens, founder of agile project management software provider Rally Software. “It’s more about picking a partner that keeps you on the path” toward a mature agile process, he said. “Otherwise, you end up with a heavy process that’s not well lined up with agility.”
Rally’s software, simply called Rally, focuses on project planning and management, Martens said. The software integrates with development tools for Eclipse, .NET, scripting and embedded projects, he pointed out, and also lets organizations assess their agile prowess and bring in elements of coaching and training. “There are a lot of choices available at the development tool level. We don’t provide tools for individuals. Those pieces get integrated with our products,” he said.
Borland Software, which is the target of an acquisition by Micro Focus, transformed its in-house development to agile at the end of 2006. The company has development centers in Austria, Australia, Singapore and Santa Ana, Calif. To achieve its goal, the company created Borland TeamFocus, an electronic team board that enables project management.
“We built out team rooms and use projectors for virtual corkboards,” said Chuck Maples, senior vice president of research and development at Borland. “You can click on the corkboard and create tasks, and then drill into those tasks. It was all designed with an enterprise agile model in mind. It’s been very successful for us. We’ve improved quality, shortened our release cycles and increased the predictability to the business.”
VersionOne is also focused on project planning and management with its V1 software, and it now has Java and .NET SDKs to allow integrations with organizations using those technologies. In late May, the company announced V1 will include IdeaSpace, modeled after Salesforce.com’s IdeaExchange, for high-volume tactical planning, prioritization and collaboration, VersionOne’s Holler explained. “There’s nothing like an economic downturn to deliver some new functionality,” he quipped.
IdeaSpace, written by VersionOne to tightly tie in to its agile platform, is a place for the business side and developers to write stories and get feedback from customers. It supports multiple forums, with security, and lets managers see who’s generating the most requests and who’s responding the most, as well as other information for use in the planning cycle, Holler said.
OutSystems offers agile platforms for an on-premises development, delivery and operations management environment, and Agile Network as software-as-a-service for managing agile projects, including training and forums. Among the important features of the software is a sizing and scoping tool that leverages user stories to define the scope of a project, so an accurate budget can be generated, according to Mike Jones, vice president of marketing for OutSystems, which has more than half of its customers making changes to and building custom packages for SAP environments.
One of the keys to the OutSystems platform is the “true change engine” built into the platform’s model-based repository environment, which enables users to understand the impact of a change to the code and provides self-healing impact analysis; it either fixes a problem or reports on it. Further, Agile Network provides a place for end users to insert comments alongside a running application, and developers can launch the code underneath that submission screen to make the change, Jones briefly explained.
“End-user acceptance flies through because it’s been so vetted by that point,” he added.
To scale for the enterprise, Jones said OutSystems found it had to break some Scrum-type roles to leverage remote resources. “We split the traditional role of Scrum Master into an engagement manager, who’s always with the customer, understanding the feedback, setting expectations and leading the demo at the end of every sprint; and a delivery manager, who is where the development team is and who owns the architecture, the application, and who’s responsible to set the scope and deadlines,” he said. “The two managers work together to facilitate collaboration between the in-house and remote resources.”
Respecting the process
Even with tooling, Agile Logic’s Hodgetts said the agile advocates within large organizations get that it requires a change in their approach to development. “You can’t just purchase agile and install it and be done with it,” he said. “You can’t just buy VersionOne and say, ‘I’m agile,’ or hire Paul [Hodgetts] for three training sessions and say, ‘Now I’m agile.’”
There are some common themes that most agree are the first steps down the road to agile development: running in shorter cycles, higher visibility, and worker collaboration. “Getting those cores in place are critical to success,” Hodgetts said.
The question of scaling agile for enterprise-wide development is no longer a question, according to Rally’s Martens. “The question now is, how good do you want to be, by when, and who’s the best partner to get you there?”
Company looks to bridge gap between IT and rest of the business
by Heather Caliendo
The Journal Record June 15, 2009 – read the full article here
TULSA – Within many businesses, a divide exists between the information technology department and the rest of the business.
“There is a fundamental distrust,” said John Marino, president of Waterfield Technologies. “Sometimes it is that classic stereotype where businesses hate IT and think they’re just dorks.”
Tulsa-based Waterfield Technologies is a software solutions provider under the Waterfield Group. Waterfield provides a broad range of financial services.
Marino said Waterfield Technologies’ clients span several different industries across the country. The company offers consulting, technology deployment and business process optimization to help organizations address and solve key business challenges.
“We are trying to push solutions that are allowing businesses to become better at what they do and extend what they are doing,” he said.
One significant problem Marino said his company observes is when the majority of a business’s departments and the IT branch don’t communicate.
“Fundamentally the business just wants to do their day job, and IT just wants to do their day job – but you have to work together,” he said. “We feel the communication process just naturally breaks down.”
Marino said he hopes their new partnership with OutSystems will help bridge the gap between IT and the other departments within a business.
OutSystems provides the Agile Platform, which is the first unified solution based on Agile methodologies. This methodology is an approach to project management typically used in software development.
While there are several highly technical aspects to Agile methodology, Marino said the premise is a philosophy shift on how companies build solutions.
Companies use the Agile Platform to enhance productivity, cost-efficiencies and overall business alignment.
The Agile Platform equips IT personnel with tools to manage business applications.
“This fosters communications between the business and IT unit so you are finding problems faster and fixing problems as they occur,” he said. “This helps give the business a solution that really meets the needs.”
Marino said he believes the Agile way will benefit Waterfield customers.
“We are really trying to solve a traditional problem between business and IT,” he said. “I really think if you poll the big companies in Tulsa and OKC, they will say IT is a necessary evil and our story is that it doesn’t have to be.”
