SCCM07 Release, when?
From Bill Anderson to all of you…
Want to reply to a note on today’s posts about SCCM 07 release time.
I saw Shaun’s post yesterday. Ah, yes – as we near release, let the “RTM pool” begin! But, I really want to warn folks of “speculation” and how much confusion it creates. I also want to speak a little bit to what the process really looks like from here out so you can get a better feel for our dates and not have to “speculate”
So, speculation. Each of you have a lot of experience in the world of managing IT projects, and you do have a good deal of expertise in thinking about how those may play out. But, I will tell you that the moving parts of an app like this is probably not something that most of you have seen before. 4.8M lines of code – managed across our team and our partner teams that we rely so heavily upon. I can tell you that it’s a WHOLE lot more than just some anecdotal feedback on bugs in determining the dates we promise to our 50,000 + enterprise customers. Remember – we PLAN on finding bugs in the release process. And we’ve built schedules/processes to mitigate those risks. But, regardless of that fact - think about the “impact” of your speculation on your peers. Hmm – MS says I should be doing my strategic planning around a certain date (Q3, CY 2007). But, now I read a post that says that date is actually months later than that. Wow – I really trust/respect the community because they give me a TON of helpful data in how to use SMS/SCCM on a daily basis. And on SMS we are so fortunate to have a community that is second to NONE that I’ve seen. So, do I change my strategy? Do I delay my evaluation and deployment schedule? It’s difficult for us to get critical info to all the SMS admins in the world in a consistent way. Trust me – the dates we’re providing are to the best of our knowledge – based on what we know about the characteristics of this version, as well as what we know of our history (both bad, and good!). I hate to see our customers that are making technical and business decisions based on our guidance start to second-guess that guidance.
So, let’s talk about that – the “believability” of projected release dates. I won’t comment on all software products <G> – but I WILL talk to SMS/SCCM. With SMS 2003 – I think many of you remember that process. There were 2 parts in the process – some early dates we were hoping for, and then the bottoms-up dates that we put in place at design complete, code complete, and Beta 1. Early dates are hard – and that’s why we try to stay fuzzy on things like a half year, or a full year. We try to buffer from what we really don’t yet know the exact design/cost is going to be. But, once we get to a bottoms-up schedule – our ability to hit it is pretty solid. We hit Beta 1 for SMS 2003, and we sized the RTM date for Sept 2003 at that point. Our actual RTM? Oct 25th. We found one reset bug in the Release Candidate process that forced another build, a quick re-deploy in TAP customers, and then sign-off.
What am I trying to say? That the dates we’re putting out there are calculated based on a LOT of things we’ve seen before. We’ve hit within a week on each of our first 2 Beta dates (Beta 2 was ACTUALLY a few days early!). We’re driving to release candidate, and RTM. If we miss release candidate, you will be the FIRST to know. We will share with you what we know in the process so you can plan accordingly! And, if we get a bug that sets the quality below what you have come to expect, we’ll fix it. It’s more important to hit the quality bar than a date.
So, will we hit our ship date exactly? Don’t know. What I do know is that we’ll ship the product when it meets your expectations. And, our track record has shown that at this part in the end game, our movement is days/weeks – not longer. Finally, know that our passion/energy right now is all driven to get this feature set out the door to you as soon as we can, with that quality bar in mind.
Bill Anderson
Lead Program Manager - System Center Configuration Manager (a.k.a - SMS)
"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse" - Henry Ford