ProSphere 1.5 out the door

Well, we did it again!  It’s been an incredibly hectic couple months, but our little baby finally hit a milestone and we got version 1.5 of ProSphere out the door.  You can read the official announcement at EMC’s site, and check out the marketing blog entry as well.

For the 1.0 release, I wrote up an insider’s perspective on the entirety of the project.  This time around, I wrote up a post for an internal audience, which ran on EMC’s Intranet site to talk about the process challenges and what we learned while delivering 1.5. So, I figured I’d write a bit here about the comparison between working on 1.0 and working on 1.5.

ProSphere 1.0 was the culmination of years of struggle to figure out how to “replace” ControlCenter.  We were replacing people, product, process — all at the same time as maintaining our revenue stream.  You can go back and read last year’s post if you want to see more of what I mean.  It was a wide open play book at the start, and just making the decision that we were “done” and could ship it was a major milestone.

1.5 didn’t have a wide open play book.  It did have a date, and a place in the overall timeline, and it was a constant fight to keep the feature count low enough to achieve that date.  Teams were rearranged, senior leadership had changed, and suddenly our product was on everyone’s radar.  The product team had to “grow up” fast to get 1.5 done, and I’d be lying if I said there weren’t any growing pains.  But it also totally validated the overall approach we had chosen for ProSphere.

Teams continued to report that they loved the tight-knit, cross-functional collaboration made possible by the Agile/SCRUM process.  Our 2-week iterations kept all interested parties up to date — there was no chance for a team to drift off target.  Our safety net of automated tests kept regressions at bay.  The tools and processes we had laid down in 1.0 allowed us rapid turnaround in 1.5 — it’s easy from “on the ground” to forget how much runway we built during 1.0, and how much effort it saved us in 1.5.

If you’re a ControlCenter customer, go read the official releases about 1.5.  Take a good hard look at that capacity dashboard and the Explore feature.  Think about what value you’re getting from ControlCenter and how hard we’ve worked to bring that value to you in a new product.

Give it a shot.  And let me know how it goes….