We are in the process determining the number of resources to support our production envrionment. We have both B2B and Enterprise with a total of 150-200 interfaces over the next 1.5 years. The amount of work on is about 20% B2B and 80% Enterprise. Is there a rule of thumb for the number of resources needed to support production?
I don't know if there is a Rule of Thumb, but here are some factors to consider:
Concurrent Integrations
If you are planning 150-200 partner drops or other integrations over 18 months, how many will be occuring at the same time?
Expect the number of integrations per month to increase over time as the process becomes standardized. As your number of integrations increases, your level of knowledge should increase as well. That will slightly offset the need for additional resources.
Retaining Knowledge
Will your firm want to retain webMethods expertise after the 18-month period or instead just monitor and minimally enhance the existing code?
If you hire an experienced webMethods consulting firm to come and do the work for you, expect a quick turnaround for your first few projects and an even faster time for subsequent integrations. After 18 months, your team will be left to monitor and maintain the code left by the consultants so be sure to be involved at every step for better transfer of knowledge.
Alternatively, you could staff the projects internally. The longest part of planning 150-200 standardized integrations is the requirements gathering phase and the subtle tweaks to the business process. Use that time creatively for your developers. Constantly challenge them to prototype your latest designs get them hands-on experience with the product.
The key here is not looking like an ass in front of your customers -- internal or external. For that reason, I would take a combination of both approaches. Bring in a limited number of experienced consultants to do your initialdevelopment for you and have them assist in deployment to your partners. Let your developers watch and learn from the consultants and, at every 5-10 project interval, you can decide whether or not to phase out the consultants and manage the integrations staffed entirely with your own internal team.
Also: Be sure to contract a consulting firm that has already performed your particular type of integration. You will likely be spending dollars training the consultants in your particular line of business so there is no need to spend more money training them on the webMethods product.
Hardware and Network Maintenance
Keep an eye on the server resources. You may need to bring on a full-time employee to monitor your webMethods Platform.
Other Points
The only Rule of Thumb I know is this: the process almost always takes longer than initially planned for. To that end, push your 18-month window out to 24 months and expect that your team will need a few months to get a head of steam going.
You will find that with careful planning and business requirements gathering, you will have repeatable code, modular design, and a solid framework to move forward. Staying focused on your end goal will help you to reduce the total number of resources needed and the amount of man-hours required to reach that goal.
iandrosov
04-22-2002, 14:01
There is really no rule of thumb in integration projects. Its all depende on how well oganized and structured you business process is and who you got on the team!
If you got 150-200 partners to integrate overtime get the important info on the sets of data!
Find which ones are standartized and can be grouped for tyopes of transactions and data.
Design a process so it works with these standards upfront this way to streamline the integration from 200 little things into 5-10 standard processes
Select first implementation, best is to take very small and very large customers first to clear any problems and volume.
Do the volume study to see if its feasble to handle the data volume using your infrastructuire and WM solution. If volumes are large you have to design WM process very careful to handle the volume!