Although Application Management consumes 70-80% of the Total Cost of Ownership, estimating and benchmarking the related effort still receives little attention. Apparently, estimating Application Management is not so simple. One of the main reasons for this, is the fact that the scope of Application Management is more diffuse than the scope of a project.
When we have defined what activities are in scope for an Application Management service offering, we are able to model this and use this model as a basis to estimate the related effort and cost. To be able to do this in a transparent way, based on experience data, we have combined the vision of our Service Component Model with the estimating power and references of SEER IT.
Next week I will present this on the 2011 SEER International Conference in Eindhoven. Although it is organised by Galorath it will have a general focus on the advancement of software estimation. Therefore this conference is proudly sponsored by Ordina. When Application Management is outsourced to an IT service provider both parties need to have a clear understanding what activities will be outsourced and what activities will remain with the outsourcing organisation. For the purpose of that understanding, Ordina has developed the Service Component Model as part of our Service Definition for Application Outsourcing. To offer our customers the best solution Ordina has developed it’s Dynamic Delivery Model to select the best IT service model for Application Management: on-site, on-shore, nearshore, offshore or a combination. This requires extra attention in the estimation and pricing process.
We have translated the Service Component Model to WBS elements that are predominantly based on the knowledge bases within SEER IT. We configured the WBS elements to be able to estimate Application Management for Oracle EBS. The configuration was calibrated using actual data from a number of contracts for Application Management in this domain. To validate the estimation power of this model we have re-estimated a number of service offerings with the knowledge we had at the time of making the proposal estimate.
This model is now ready to be used as a reference estimate in our general approach for estimating and pricing of software services for Application Management in the Oracle EBS domain.
The presentation I will give combines the content of two papers I have presented at the combined 2011 UKSMA-COSMIC conference on Software Metrics and Estimating:
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The articles I mentioned and references in the articles should be a good starting point. There is also a loot of information on SEER IT on the Galorath website.
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