Technology Consulting Group Gains Design Efficiencies with ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Information Technology Consulting

Customer Profile

Headquartered in Edison, NJ, and operating across North America, Fujitsu Consulting is a leading provider of customer-focused information technology solutions.

Business Situation

Fujitsu Consulting wanted to increase solution design and delivery efficiency, increase reuse, lower maintenance cost, get better predictability, all within a Macroscope®-compliant and integrated development environment.

Solution

The Macroscope team is testing the Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2005 development system for added functionality as well as Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 for increased business intelligence capabilities.

Benefits

■ Better communication

■ Software development lifecycle management tools

■ An extensible platform

■ Powerful project management

■ Improved product usability

| | |“As we see it, Visual Studio Team System expands on the successes of Microsoft in delivering tightly integrated, highly productive software development lifecycle tools.”

Serge Deschamps, VP for Macroscope and Knowledge Management, Fujitsu Consulting

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| | | |Fujitsu Consulting has been a leading provider of consulting services and technology-based business |

| | | |solutions for more than 30 years. Macroscope® is Fujitsu’s integrated suite of business and |

| | | |information technology (IT) methods designed to help companies implement and manage organizational |

| | | |change. Macroscope encapsulates more than 25 years of consulting experience. By combining Macroscope|

| | | |with the tools in Microsoft® Visual Studio® Team System, as well as Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for|

| | | |the Microsoft Office System and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, Fujitsu is helping its customers |

| | | |transform their businesses and deliver business value faster at a lesser cost by providing proven, |

| | | |best-in-class business and IT methodology integrated with a leading-edge IT solution development |

| | | |environment. |

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| | | | |

| | | |Macroscope is a registered trademark of Fujitsu Consulting (Canada) Inc. |

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| | | |[pic] |

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Situation

A trusted provider of management and technology consulting to business and government organizations, Fujitsu Consulting Services is the North American consulting and services arm of the U.S.$44.5-billion Fujitsu Group. Fujitsu Consulting integrates the core expertise of the Fujitsu companies and its partners to deliver complete business solutions in the areas of IT governance, information management, legacy systems modernization, and application outsourcing.

Fujitsu Consulting’s offerings extend from strategic management consulting to system integration, development, and maintenance. Encapsulating more than 30 years of experience in technology and information management, Fujitsu’s Macroscope® integrated suite of business and IT processes is an industry-leading solution designed to boost an organization’s overall business performance through added efficiency in introducing changes into the business. Today, the suite is well positioned in the enterprise market; in fact, Macroscope is qualified by Gartner as "a visionary suite among the best methodology sets in the world" and positioned in the “Leaders” quadrant within their Magic Quadrant assessment report.

Macroscope is an integrated set of methodologies designed to help organizations launch, implement, and manage organizational changes through key business initiatives such as strategic planning; business transformation; business and IT architecture; and applications and systems development, deployment, and maintenance. Macroscope has become Fujitsu Consulting’s standard framework to deliver services to its customers. Macroscope is also licensed as a commercial product and has helped many organizations accelerate their implementation of a process set that satisfied the requirements of Capability Maturity Model® Integration (CMMI) level three and higher.

Due to the nature of Fujitsu Consulting’s business, where consultants need to work in a variety of environments, Macroscope has always been tool-agnostic. This needed to change, however, as the need arose both internally and from customers to provide ready-to-use development environments integrated with Macroscope.

In 2003, Microsoft and Fujitsu Consulting, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, jointly invested in creating a highly effective solution for project and program managers by combining the power of Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 with Fujitsu’s Macroscope into an offering called EPMSuite. To further improve the productivity of the design and development teams, the company wanted an integrated development platform that would:

■ Enable developers to link and store each project work product or deliverable (such as functional requirements, programming standards, code, work schedule, etc.) according to the methodology’s structure, rules, and guidelines.

■ Allow developers to track changes made to any work product component, as well as to identify the impacts of such changes to other components, and automatically adjust those affected components accordingly.

■ Automate and monitor the deliverable life cycle through its different states (review, validate, approve), eliminating the need for numerous e-mails and manual tracking of these deliverables.

■ Save Fujitsu and its customers time and money by providing easier and more efficient project management capabilities.

Therefore, when Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Microsoft Visual Studio® Team System and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005, Fujitsu developers were eager to begin using this comprehensive enterprise development solution to see if it would meet their design platform objectives for Macroscope.

The Fujitsu team quickly realized the power of the extensibility features offered by Visual Studio Team System, the Smart Document technology and the DSL toolkit, and recognized how building on this infrastructure could provide them with the tools they required to create all the deliverables mandated by the Macroscope methodology, using an integrated and highly efficient tool set.

In addition, the tightly integrated and extensible lifecycle tools associated with Visual Studio Team System, combined with the new development tools, programming interfaces, run-time services, and management utilities in SQL Server 2005, could dramatically extend the capabilities of the product. The result Fujitsu wanted? Increased business solution design and delivery efficiency, better solution quality, increased reuse, lower maintenance cost, better predictability, all within a Macroscope-compliant development environment.

Solution

In early April 2005, Fujitsu began testing and developing the extension to Visual Studio Team System that was needed to build the Macroscope deliverables. Using Visual Studio Team System, Fujitsu Consulting created project templates that are adaptable to different Macroscope paths such as Web development, smart client, package customization, and more. These templates can even be further customized for work items specific to the workflow approval process. Each work item contains a Web link to the Macroscope Web page explaining the deliverable and providing guidance, as well as a Web link to the Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 site that contains the smart document template for this deliverable. SharePoint Portal Server 2003 provides access to the deliverables, ensures version control, and allows users to follow the status of deliverables throughout the workflow process using reports available from the project portal Web Site. The Macroscope Web site project guidance can be accessed from within Microsoft Visual Studio Team Explorer.

Macroscope uses the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System, together with the Visual Studio integrated toolkit and the Microsoft Office smart document for added functionality. For example, from the Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE), a developer can check-in to the repository a graphic representation of a diagram required by a Macroscope deliverable and build it with the DSL toolkit. This diagram can then be inserted automatically into the appropriate methodology deliverables.

The Microsoft Office application pane includes an XSD schema of every Macroscope deliverable. From the task pane a developer can tag each piece of information to be stored in the repository. Some of those tags are even filled in by the content of the repository when the document is first opened. The document can then be generated by a deliverable build engine using the Microsoft Word template, and the content of the repository and the resulting document are stored in a SharePoint document library available on the project portal site.

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is used as the Macroscope repository. Using SQL Server 2005 Business Intelligence Development Studio gives Fujitsu comprehensive integration, analysis, and reporting services for better real-time insight into the development process. The repository, which is filled using the Visual Studio IDE and Microsoft Office applications data model, also stores the Macroscope artifacts.

The Microsoft .NET Framework drives Fujitsu’s deliverable engine on the server side. It is used to extract the repository content and provide that content to the Word templates to build deliverables.

Benefits

The flexibility and agility built into Visual Studio Team System deliver a predictable and repeatable development experience. For both Fujitsu and its customers, this enacts the rich set of Macroscope processes and provides a complete solution through robust tool integration capabilities. As Serge Deschamps, Fujitsu Consulting’s VP for Macroscope and Knowledge Management, explains, “The Visual Studio Team System extension features allowed us to easily implement the Macroscope meta-model to provide a seamless and highly productive delivery environment—both Fujitsu and our customers are benefiting from the power of Visual Studio Team System and the robustness of a full-scope business and IT methodology.”

Fujitsu and its customers that have adopted Macroscope as their methodology framework, have already experienced tangible improvements in the predictability of the development process. “Some customers have reported reducing the project estimation variance from over 100 percent to below 10 percent, reduced new development project costs by up to 30 percent, and slashed their maintenance cost of each function point by up to 50 percent,” says Deschamps. Fujitsu anticipates that the proven Macroscope process guidance, prescriptive architectural guidance, and solution accelerators built into Visual Studio Team System, teamed with the enhanced self-tuning capabilities of SQL Server 2005, will even further increase these benefits—with increased delivery capability and money saved for Fujitsu and its customers as the outcome.

Deschamps sums it up by noting, “Fujitsu’s Macroscope and Microsoft Visual Studio Team System will uniquely help our clients transform their businesses, deliver business value faster and at lesser cost by providing proven best-in-class business and IT methodology integrated with leading-edge IT solution development environment.”

Enabling Effective Communication

Visual Studio Team System integration features, combined with the powerful BI capabilities of Microsoft SQL Server 2005, enable more effective communication by reducing the overhead typically associated with tracking progress, reporting status, and monitoring the deliverable validation.

Managing the Software Development Lifecycle

“As we see it, Visual Studio Team System expands on the successes of Microsoft in delivering tightly integrated, highly productive software development lifecycle tools,” says Deschamps. Fujitsu developers use the testing and performance tools built into Visual Studio Team System, such as unit testing, code analysis, and performance profiling, to design for quality, early on and often throughout the lifecycle. When developers can identify and address quality issues early in the development lifecycle, they can fix problems at a time when it’s most cost-effective to do so.

The tightly integrated and extensible lifecycle tools offered are increasing the predictability of its software development process. Deschamps explains, “If you remove the administrative work, enhance the possibility of reuse among the deliverables, minimize the work required to update the various deliverables, offer an integrated environment that makes it easy for a newcomer to move from one deliverable to the other through the generated hyperlinks, then I can conservatively talk about up to a 15 percent productivity increase.”

Building an Extensible Platform

Sylvain Taccucci, Fujitsu’s Lead Architect on the Fujitsu’s Macroscope/Visual Studio Team System integration project, enthusiastically explains, “Added functionality in VSTS allowed us to build this integrated product offering that can be used to support the Macroscope methodology and produce the required deliverables in an effective manner. Previously, our consultants were using anything from the Microsoft Visio® drawing and diagramming program, Microsoft PowerPoint® and Microsoft Office Word, cutting and pasting between documents, and juggling with folder structures to store and retrieve their documents.” Now developers can build project deliverables with the Visual Studio IDE by using the DSL provided, which is 100 percent compatible with the type of models Macroscope recommends. “For example,” Taccucci continues, “by using the smart tags in Word, the technical architect can create a ‘Programming Standards’ document in which each rule is stored individually in the repository. If you change the Word template, if you modify a rule, then you simply regenerate the document—and you can access each version of this document from the SharePoint site. Authors can submit their documents for review, which then creates work items for each person involved in the review process. The project manager can see that Person ‘X’ was allowed three days to review the document and is now one day late. This allows corrective actions to be taken without delay—quite a change from the previous method of project managers having to ask everyone, individually who has a document, what state is it in.”

Visual Studio Team System provides Fujitsu project teams with methodology templates to define the process that individual projects will follow. This includes a flexible tool set that works with both agile and more traditional processes. In addition, the following process extensibility features enable Fujitsu developers to customize work item types, check-in policies, custom reports, and project management templates:

■ Extensibility toolkit for Visual Studio Team System.

■ Built-in application programming interface (API).

■ Web service API from the service side of Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server.

■ Smart Document interface built into Word

■ Ability of Word to create XML-format documents.

Gaining Powerful Project Management Tools

Visual Studio Team System delivers a series of project management tools based on the software that project managers already know—the Microsoft Office System (including Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet software, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Word, and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint Services). Smart document capabilities, a dashboard site, and the capability to explore project data eliminate the need for Fujitsu’s developers to create layers of mapping and cross-reference documents.

In addition, the Portfolio Explorer tool integrates work products into the Visual Studio IDE, which provides for effective team access. Rich reports provide metrics collected throughout the team workflow, and a customizable project process, based on industry-proven practices, drives the lifecycle.

Improving Product Usability

The Macroscope integration with Visual Studio Team System will dramatically reduce the time required to implement solutions in Fujitsu’s customer project environments. This time (and money) savings occurs for Fujitsu and its customers during solution set up as well as during training once the solution is deployed. “The broad user knowledge of the Microsoft Windows environment will allow our customers to be up and running with minimal training time—the tool already ‘speaks’ the Macroscope language, which means they can be productive using the new solution immediately,” says Deschamps.

Reducing Software Development Overhead

Using the development tools in Visual Studio 2005, Fujitsu’s analysts, programmers, and architects are spending significantly less time filling out documentation or typing in Word, so they have more time and energy to direct toward the more critical tasks of analyzing, programming, or architecting solutions. “Our developers aren’t wasting time searching through a complex directory structure or typing or formatting documents—now they can spend more time building solutions content,” explains Taccucci. This significantly reduces the overhead project teams would otherwise spend on development—which results in savings for both Fujitsu and its customers.

For more information on Macroscope, go to: us/services/consulting/method/macroscope/

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System™ is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

Microsoft SQL Server 2005

Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is comprehensive, integrated data management and analysis software that enables organizations to reliably manage mission-critical information and confidently run today’s increasingly complex business applications. By providing high availability, security enhancements, and embedded reporting and data analysis tools, SQL Server

2005 helps companies gain greater insight from their business information and achieve faster results for a competitive advantage. And, because it’s part of Windows Server System™, SQL Server 2005 is designed to integrate seamlessly with your other server infrastructure investments.

For more information about SQL Server 2005, go to:

sqlserver

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

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“Added functionality in VSTS allowed us to build this integrated product offering that can be used to support the Macroscope methodology and produce the required deliverables in an effective manner.”

Sylvain Taccucci, Lead Architect on Fujitsu’s Macroscope/VSTS Integration Project

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft SQL Server 2005

■ Microsoft Visual Studio Team System

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server

− Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Tools for the Microsoft Office System

|Microsoft Office System

− Microsoft Office Project Server 2003

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■ Technologies

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© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, Visio, Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published October 2005 | | |

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For more information about Fujitsu Consulting products and services, visit the Web site at:

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