Release Planner™ technology has brought significant value to our business by providing Trema Laboratories Inc. with a highly innovative, versatile and web integrated solution for achieving a faster time-to-market solution for our products and services.

Through the usage of ReleasePlanner™, Trema Laboratories Inc. has received a complementary solution and the skills to manage the top challenges in release planning process by providing us with a set of alternative solutions considering all constraints and dependencies between requirements, bringing in the opinion of all the stakeholders through the web for planning and also providing us with a powerful methodology to reflect the changing requirements in our project plans. The time to generate release plans and to alter release plans because of changing requirements was drastically reduced to clicks of buttons from a process that took several days.

ReleasePlanner™ helped us in aligning our project goals with our overall business vision. We were able to achieve great success in the most critical aspects of our project planning by having dramatic improvement in:

• Time saving performing planning pulling together the roadmap and generating the release plans takes 60% of a full time job for a product manager and a release manager. ReleasePlanner™ provides a quick overview of requirements and the generation of alternative release plan becomes trivial through the push of a button on the keyboard. It is estimated through the case study that a saving of about 50% of the time spent carrying out the initial plan is achieved.

• Quick and improved re-planning Changes in requirements always need to revise the plan to accommodate the change. This process consumes about 30% of a release manager's job including the time of other stakeholders involved in the release. It is estimated that stakeholders spend on average three hours a week for re-planning during the release. The findings in the case study indicate that a time saving of 75% is achievable through the use of ReleasePlanner™.

• Better match of customer needs and hence increased stakeholder satisfaction. With ReleasePlanner™ stakeholders are able and more motivated to participate from wherever they are in the prioritization process for as long as they have access to the Internet. This saves time and travel cost and allows comprehensive stakeholder involvement, which is a key factor for achieving release products that actually match customer needs.

• Improved time to market. Since the appropriate selection of requirements are delivered in the release, the product gets to market with these required features. This potentially leads to increased market share through customer satisfaction with the product. It is estimated that by getting the product to market at the right time with the right features there is a contribution of about 0.1% to the total sales revenue of the product.

Satisfying these critical aspects for product deliverables and services has posed numerous challenges for any organization in today's competitive market and keeping this in mind; ReleasePlanner™ is a valuable asset to Brocade as we develop innovative new products and services.

Joseph Momoh, Project Manager
Trema Laboratories Inc.