Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems

planning, implementation and maintenance, but decreases stakeholder satisfac-

tion, since only the business topics common to all stakeholders are considered.

On the other side, there is still a need to be able to customize the IS due to

country speciﬁc needs. In particular, this entails the following four challenges,

which may be also common to other domains.

(C1) Identiﬁcation of Business Strategy Similarities. So far diﬀerent

company country sites have their own local solution without taking advantage

of synergies. Examples for such synergies are large-scale reuse similar to product

line concepts [9] or identiﬁcation of business topics that are addressed by many

countries and therefore of high priority. So far, the company has managed to

integrate multiple business strategies of a small number of countries, by small

adaptations of the processes used for local systems. However, since business is an

inconsistent environment, the comparison and linking of multiple business strate-

gies are diﬃcult and complex. Thus, for many diﬀerent countries more powerful

methods are needed to support decisions during the strategic release planning

and re-planning process for global IS to achieve an applicable combination of

customization and standardization capabilities.

(C2) Common Understanding of Global Features. Using global features

for release planning requires that several countries must have a common under-

standing of the features and their relation to the countries own business strategy.

Furthermore, during global SRP and alignment with a huge number of hetero-

geneous stakeholder groups the business topics, mostly represented as features,

have to be organized and linked more business oriented. Therefore, the chal-

lenge is to utilize business topics for feature creation to get a closer link between

business strategies and planned IS.

(C3) Continuous Validation of Roadmaps against Multiple Business

Strategies. A roadmap is a living document reﬂecting the continuous change of

business and IS aspects over time. This requires a continuous validation process

of the roadmap elements such as selected features against business objectives.

A close link between business strategies and planned IS (see C2) is necessary to

validate a roadmap against the strategy. Clearly, for multiple business strategies

the validation task gets more complex and diﬃcult, as the number of changes

is multiple. For example, it is diﬃcult to decide what the right frequency for

roadmap validation is or which events call for a re-validation.

(C4) Missing Hybrid Role: Business Engineer vs. Software Product

Manager. Planning and developing global IS is a diﬃcult and complex task

that requires both deep knowledge about business aspects (e.g. strategies or pro-

cesses) and technology aspects (e.g. possible mobile data and application access).

It is important to have one role responsible for this global SRP. In particular, the

Strategic Release Planning Challenges For Global Information Systems - A Position Paper Page 4