Competitive pressure strikes to the core of every business connected in some way to the telecom industry. Carrier, vendor, OEM supplier, third- party application developer. It seeps into every company at every level. One of the first business levels to be judged for competitive proficiency is the product development lifecycle. But don't ignore the message if you're not a vendor. For carriers, it's the service development lifecycle that is put on trial. For OEM companies, it's the development schedule as it relates to delivery to primary manufacturers. 
 

To deal with these changes, a new business of process is emerging. Solutions are being developed to help telecom companies improve their efficiency. A funny thing: Process-based products to help companies change their product-based processes.

One such solution is the Quantum Leap Methodology (QLM), developed by systems designer and OEM product developer Kalman Saffran, president of Kalman Saffran Associates, Newton, Mass. 

Upstart sat down recently with Saffran to discuss QLM and also sought the views of Michael Doss, VP of marketing and business strategy for Siemens Information and Communication Networks in Boca Raton, Fla. Doss has never seen QLM but agreed to offer his thoughts on the concept of a product to improve product development. 

Upstart: So what is QLM? 

Saffran; "It's a fairIy fundamental, straight-forward system, not complicated at all. It addresses all phases of the product development lifecycle, from specification through testing and release. QLM is a system that consists of several components: One is the methodology itself, another is a set of processes that implement the methodology. Below the processes, we have methods and procedures. We also have techniques, tools, templates and frameworks." 

Upstart: But "methodology" just means a specific way of tackling a problem, right? 

Saffran: "That's the essence of it. QLM consists of a framework of processes, and the processes address the lifecycle of product development. So there are processes for specifications, for architectures, for designs, for verifications, etc. When you put all those processes together in a framework that kind of controls your execution, you call that a 'methodology.'" 

Upstart: So in very basic terms, the idea is not having to reinvent the wheel every time you develop a new product, but use reusable building blocks instead? 

Saffran: "Yes. It's based on the fundamental concepts of accuracy, precision and consistency - as well as on the '80-15-5' rule. In other words, the top 5% of activities contributes 95% of the results. QLM is a methodology that focuses on that top 5% in particular, then secondarily on that 15% and doesn't address the bottom percentage at all."

Upstart: Why did you develop QLM? 

Saffran: "Companies were taking too long and spending too much money to develop products. In a lot of cases, after all was said and done, the products were non-performing or not scalable or they had too many bugs. In some cases, the company tended to trade off quality for time. Of course, the winning combination is a high-quality product developed fast." 
Upstart: Just how long is today's time to market? 
Saffran: "The average time to market ranges in various industries, including telecom, from about 18 to 24 months - although the computer industry is a little faster these days, probably 12 to 18 months. Most companies want to reduce that by a substantial amount - in a lot of cases, they want to cut it in half." 

Upstart: Do you agree with that estimate for telecom, Michael?

Doss: "Yes, and we're all feeling the pressure. That pressure has been there for some time in the enterprise LAN arena, as traffic has grown amazingly fast in the net-works there. The equipment becomes obsolete very quickly, and therefore the user is constantly purchasing new equipment.

"Now it's starting to be a real pattern in WANs, obviously driven by the Internet [traffic]. Everybody will use the words 'doubling in less than a year,' and some will be aggressive enough to say 'doubling every three months.' When you get that kind of growth, there's enormous pressure on the switches and routers in your backbone network. What you install to handle your traffic this year just won't handle your traffic next year, and you've got to install a whole new set." 

Upstart: All right then - you speed up your time to market, cut your costs and become a tougher competitor. Why can't companies do that themselves? 

Saffran: "In the past, efficiency of productivity wasn't an important issue, Now that there are many new competitors in the marketplace, it's not just a question of, can you get your product or service to market, but also how fast can you do it?

"A lot of companies don't have this in place because they lack internal expertise in methodology. In most companies, there has not been a formal function to address product development methodology per se." 

Upstart: How do you feel about that, Michael? 

Doss: "This phenomenon of faster time to market is just now happening on the WAN side. So it's really new for all of us. Without commenting on their capability, if Mr. Saffran and his people can do what they say they can do, I think they've got a winner. 

"Now, I think we will all use companies like his as tools. We also will develop internal techniques - we'll do a lot of things. And five years from now, Mr. Saffran probably will have to find another industry segment that's coming under time-to-market pressure. [By that time], I suspect the big telecom vendors will have responded to this, just as I believe the LAN and PC vendors already have responded internally. I don't think we're nearly as far along as the LAN and PC manufacturers are, in terms of time-to-market tools and programs." 

Upstart: Who's more likely to use your QLM - carriers or the equipment manufacturers? 

Saffran: "Both, really, but probably the manufacturer more than the carrier, simply because the manufacturer develops many more products than the carrier does. QLM is applicable to all of a manufacturer's product development - hardware, software, datacom, telecom, cable TV. Quantum Leap Methodology-Information Technology, or QLM-IT, is oriented toward the development of MIS applications in an end-user environment." 

"So, let's say it takes a manufacturer two years to develop a switch. With this methodology, it's possible to reduce that time by up to 50%, to approach one year." 
Upstart: Is it really possible to chop 50% off development time? 

Doss: "Yes, and it's a necessity. If you go back to the thought that Internet traffic is doubling every 4 to 6 months, that tells you that within two of these doubling cases, your backbone switch or router is out of gas. The backbone you build today has to be replaced in less than l2 months, maybe closer to 9 months. 

"If you're an ISP, your vendor better have a new product available 9 to 12 months down the road that at least doubles or triples throughput and capacity - or you will switch to someone else who does have that." 

Upstart: Besides ISPs, are vendors feeling the same pressure from CLECs and other carriers? 

Doss: "Yes, Most of the typical 'communications operators' now are actually running four to six net- works - a voice network, an lSP kind of network and three or four data networks for their business customers, frame relay, circuit emulation, IP, SNA, what have you. Operating separate networks is costing them an enormous amount of money. They would like to converge those. 

"This convergence is the most important thing happening in the telecom business day. We don't think it's going to get down to one network, but we believe this half-dozen networks will get down to three: the narrow- band voice network, an Internet net- work that handles only IP traffic and then this third 'converged' network, which has to offer high quality of service for all these different data types. Initially it will be ATM-based, and eventually it will be based on IP technology - as soon as we add a few steroids to IP to make it strong enough. 

"Obviously, the Internet network is the one that's now driving this time-to-market, but we think that as voice and video move over to this converged network, it will start growing that fast, too. This phenomenon of time-to-market is going to hit the converged network in the next couple of years. So once we all learn to turn out products in 9 to 12 months, instead of l8 to 24, we're going to have to learn to do it also in these more complex, higher quality-of-service networks." 

Upstart: Will carriers awarding equipment contracts look more favorably on QLM-based vendors? 

Saffran: "Yes, because aside from the reduction in time-to-market and associated costs, which could be passed on to the buyer, there's also the predictability aspect. With QLM, you can fairly accurately predict your schedules and your interim milestones, so the carrier has a high level of confidence of getting what it's buying in the requisite time frame." 

Doss: "Another point here, just a couple years ago, what you had to do as a vendor and what the service provider offered was a fairly narrow set of things. Now our customers, the service providers, want to provide all these networks, so the breadth of our product range has grown tremendously.

"One way to fill in your product set - when you need more breadth than you've got the engineering depth to do - is OEM. But another way is to use people and tools like Mr. Saffran's company to leverage your own engineers more. So I think that (with operators broadening all their service offerings, and equipment vendors [getting] into a huge range of stuff, you're going to see more of this [outsourcing]. No one company can do it all." 

Upstart: What does QLM consist of anyway?

Saffran: "What we call 'Phase Zero' is a review of a limited operation within a manufacturer, to see where the areas for greatest improvement lie. For example, we would produce a report that identifies key areas where there are any potential returns. We would then rank those returns in a financial way, based on ROI and payback period. Then the next phase would be applying the methodology to one or more of those areas." 

Upstart: Does QLM face any competition in the market today?

Saffran: "We haven't done complete market research to know exactly what the competitive products are, so let me give you a 'back-of-the-envelope' analysis. Essentially, the products in the IT domain are for particular aspects of the lifecycle - a product that helps you do specification, another that helps you do testing, etc. Most of these are tools, and a tool is a very narrow, limited thing. It's not a methodology. On the engineering side, there are also many, many tools, but they don't address the methodology end, either. We've essentially developed a complete lifecycle system. On the selling side, whether a company is developing software-based systems or both hardware- and software- based systems, to our knowledge, there are no competitors."