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Build vs. BuyThe Case for using Commercial Solution Frameworks to Extend Microsoft® SharePoint®

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2© 2011, Bamboo Solutions Corporation

The ability to easily configure Microsoft® SharePoint® out-of-the-box to support unique end user solutions is advantageous, but when the solution requirements demand custom software development as opposed to simple configuration, IT organizations often discover that the results are unpredictable. Which is the optimal approach: building custom software for SharePoint and owning the resulting intellec-tual property, or licensing commercial off-the-shelf software add-ons that extend SharePoint and then configuring them to support unique solutions?

Two recent studies of SharePoint customers suggest that many organizations are tending towards developing custom software, but that a significant percent of such projects end up costing more and taking longer than expected. In the first study, a variety of barriers such as end user adoption, governance, and training were mentioned as major barriers to a suc-cessful SharePoint deployment, but the largest

number of respondents said that their leading barrier to deployment was the development time and effort required to build applications. In the second study, a quarter of respondents said that their SharePoint deployments were technically more difficult than expected, and a third said that their projects took more time than was planned. Almost 40% said that their SharePoint solutions were created through customization rather than through the use of off-the-shelf software, with just 28% claiming to use third-party software.

This paper makes the case that underestima-tion of software development costs and the risks associated with custom development is a leading cause for unpredictable results. The case for using configurable commercial soft-ware rather than custom-developed software is examined as a way to shorten implementa-tion time, reduce project risks, and significantly lower deployment costs.

Summary

Contents

2 Summary2 The Situation3 Strategic Fit3 SharePoint Solution Implementation Challenges and Risks4 Implementation Costs and Schedules: Go-live or Escape?4 Planning and Staffing5 Development and Deployment Risks7 Using Commercial Solution Frameworks to Extend SharePoint8 A Quantitative Evaluation: Solution Framework vs. Custom-coding8 Application Development 9 Ongoing Software Support9 Creating Corporate Value through Custom Software


By using SharePoint to deploy purpose-built applications, companies hope to broaden in-ternal use, lower IT support costs, and provide employees with access to corporate informa-tion assets that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. The primary inhibitor to executing upon this vision remains the time and cost associ-ated with solution implementation.

SharePoint began in many organizations as a simple intranet, a document repository, or a place to manage lists. As SharePoint matured into its present SharePoint 2010 incarnation, broad market acceptance and technical flex-ibility have both allowed companies to increas-ingly use it as part of their mission-critical IT infrastructure, with the goal of delivering busi-ness applications directly to end users through a consistent SharePoint interface. Today it’s not uncommon for use cases of SharePoint to include forms of collaborative project and port-folio management, case and request manage-ment, social applications, sales and marketing automation, document management, learning management, executive information systems, meeting or membership systems, business

analytics, and a seemingly endless list of special-case departmental sites that enhance team collaboration. In addition, budget tighten-ing has caused both corporations and govern-ment entities to use SharePoint as an alterna-tive platform to legacy ECM applications that routinely cost millions of dollars to develop and maintain.

For example, • a global oil company which currently uses SharePoint to underpin cross-plant Facilities Management by initially presenting content from their legacy ECM system, and plans to eventually migrate into a “pure” SharePoint solution;

• a major financial services company that has standardized on SharePoint as their “presen-tation layer” to aggregate data from legacy SQL® databases and display meaningful risk management dashboards;

• a defense agency using SharePoint to re-place disparate ECM/workflow solutions that currently assign and track “taskers” across component agencies.

Strategic FitWhen we at Bamboo® talk with customers, we are often surprised to learn that many have no real overarching SharePoint Strategy. In-fact, recent AIIM® estimates say that almost half of SharePoint customers lack a clear strategy. More curiously, SharePoint users often tell us there is no high-level agreement among their staff about just what role SharePoint should have over time as a collaboration platform relative to email, voice communications and the various social media approaches, what the underlying business objectives are of a specif-ic project implementation, or what the internal

use cases and focus of their deployment will be as time goes on. SharePoint is the fastest growing business application in history, but its rate of proliferation seems to have surpassed the typical organization’s ability to respond to issues surrounding strategy, corporate plan-ning and governance. The result is that CIO offices today struggle with putting appropriate plans and controls into place while their inter-nal number of SharePoint sites and use cases continue to grow virally.

This lack of governance and planning can dramatically increase the cost and complex-

SharePoint Solution Implementation Challenges and Risks

The Situation


ity of mission-critical projects down the road. Maintaining flexibility is therefore important, and so tailoring SharePoint out-of-the-box or using commercial software frameworks should be preferable to creating custom-developed software when possible. When significant cus-tom software development is involved, each iteration or change will require use of scarce technical resources that may or may not be immediately available. In this way, the simple lack of an agreed upon overarching strategy and set of objectives for SharePoint can itself drive up implementation costs over time; the problem becomes compounded when there is significant custom software involved.

Implementation Costs and Schedules: Go-live or Escape?SharePoint’s out-of-the-box functionality certainly provides the basic tools to configure business solutions. Companies are migrating where possible to SharePoint-based business applications in order to lower the cost of sup-port associated with multiple legacy best-of-breed applications. In so doing, they may be trading off some of the little used or complex features and functions of the legacy applica-tion for hopes of broader adoption, more ease of use, and decentralized administration. But in their haste, these companies run the risk of falling into the same money trap – albeit on a newer, more fashionable platform. The myriad of unique requirements often demand that im-plementation teams develop functionality that extends SharePoint beyond its out-of-the-box capabilities. In such cases, project costs and schedules can be quite hard to predict. Some projects never seem to go-live, but instead finally escape a kind of entropy that keeps ever-increasingly complex projects alive. To understand why, we must dig deeper into each of the three key areas of activity: Planning and Staffing, Development, Deployment and Sup-port.

Planning and StaffingThe most critical constraint for any Share-Point project is the availability and skills of the resources at your disposal, and SharePoint’s growth has far outstripped the availability of “qualified” staff that is required to architect, manage, and develop projects. For projects involving custom software development, these resources must include those skilled not just in SharePoint, but .NET programming, site architecture/design, workflow, and of course the business logic around what you are trying to accomplish. Such skills are in even higher demand and must be either sourced in-house or from a third-party depending upon your ex-isting pool of available talent. Businesses look-ing to staff internal projects find themselves competing with independent software vendors and systems integrators who are also desper-ate for resources. Here at Bamboo Solutions, for example, the time required for us to hire and then ramp-up skilled engineering talent generally requires a full six months.

This lack of skilled resources is causing many organizations to consider foregoing the re-quirement of SharePoint design experience and instead hire strong .NET developers who must then be trained in SharePoint. Certifica-tions and training programs from both Micro-soft and third-parties make such training a viable long-term approach. But in the shorter-term, it is only the hands-on experience devel-oping software for SharePoint that can make projects predictable. Relatively speaking, armies of SharePoint resources can configure applications. But only a tiny percentage of available resources are qualified architects, designers, and developers with significant SharePoint software development project experience.

Integrators are another alternative, but cost is a major consideration. A typical service-pro-vider fee structure is between $ 200 and $300 per hour for Sr. SharePoint Design Architects


and Sr. Project Leads, $ 150-$200 per hour for Sr. engineers, and $ 100-$150 per hour for developers. Divide these rates by two or three when going off-shore, but add additional pro-gram management, QA, liaising, and iteration costs. And, beyond these project costs, once a project is completed, the strategic need for core internal skills remains.

Development and Deployment Risks

Software Development RisksThe decision to fund custom software develop-ment is usually driven by an assessment of es-timated project costs based upon the business and functional requirements. Unless software development is a core skill of your business, such estimates often fail to account for the true long-term costs. For example, incompatibilities with new software added in the future can re-quire changes to your developed software long after its initial deployment. The next release of SharePoint or .NET may require that tweaks be made before your custom software will function. And of course, there are the fixes to

the inevitable minor bugs in the code that will be unearthed over time.

When custom-coded software development is involved, costs continue for the useful life of the software – and not just the life of the project. As a check-point, any scan of publicly traded software businesses will illustrate: soft-ware development/engineering expenses are typically 15-25% of software sales for these kinds of businesses - forever. Much of that ex-pense is the ongoing improvement of existing, rather than new software.

All new software projects begin with the core challenge that the viability and utility of the finished software is not precisely understood or appreciated until prototypes and/or various stages of implementation have actually been tested in an environment similar to the target environment. Regardless of which develop-ment methodology is employed, this results in an all-too-common scenario where scope creep, poor collaboration, and organizational change management conspire to turn a seem-ingly straightforward project into a continuous cycle of cost and schedule overruns.

Software complexity increases over time so that in practice, the more mature a piece of software is, the more costly it is to add to or change.


In January, 2003, an article by Carmine Man-gione in CIO Update provided a nice frame-work outlining this phenomenon. In it, he describes how software complexity increases over time so that in practice, the more ma-ture a piece of software is, the more costly it is to add to or change. The result is that new projects start with a fairly linear relationship between added functionality and costs (what your initial project estimate usually shows), but over time the relationship actually tends to become exponential. As the old saw goes, “You can get 80% of the functionality in 20% of the time, but that last 20% will take 80% of the time.” Consider that once your initial project is done, the next time you make a change or addition, you may be past the “linear” zone and into the “exponential” zone of cost. This is further exacerbated if those specific individuals involved in the initial project are not available for follow-on work, since source code docu-mentation is rarely so perfect as to eliminate a significant learning curve for new developers. Project RisksIn addition to the increasing cost of software complexity, projects themselves carry a vari-ety of risk. One of the most often-cited refer-ences concerning risk is the Annual CHAOS report by The Standish Group International, Inc., which states that the average software project success rate is 34%, with fifteen percent (15%) of projects failing outright and 51% categorized as “challenged.” An August 2010 article by Scott Ambler in Dr. Dobbs.com presents research that suggests that the suc-cess rate may be “as high as” between 47% for traditional and 61% for Agile projects. Even that more optimistic research shows between 28% and 37% of projects as being “chal-lenged.” Clearly, projects of this type present significant challenges to IT organizations.1

The bottom line is that unless you have sub-stantial competency in software development

with SharePoint, a resource pool that can expand if there are delays due to employee ill-ness or termination, and well-defined business strategy that demands software development as a core competence, your overall project is probably at risk of up to 50% in time and cost. Then after the initial project, the follow-on costs and the future costs of change and enhancements can easily be significantly more costly than was projected.

The Cost of Ongoing SupportAs previously noted, the cost of custom soft-ware development does not end when the project ends. A variety of support costs will be incurred after your project goes live. These may include the costs of bug fixes, testing, and optimizing new versions of SharePoint, .NET, SQL or other changes to the platform, testing interaction with other new changes to your SharePoint environment, and minor performance improvements. Smaller custom development projects have an added support burden if future engineering support is tied di-rectly to the availability of the specific individu-als that developed the software. Unlike large commercial software projects where a team of developers work on the software continually over time, and where time and energy is spent in extra code documentation, small custom software projects are usually performed by a very small number of people, or even one person. The amount of code documentation is often not complete to the point where new developers could quickly come in and take over. At project completion, the custom-de-velopment team will typically move onto other projects. So when support and/or extensions of the software are later required, the learning curve must be partially repeated and delays occur to accommodate schedules. This is further exacerbated if the specific individuals involved have taken on new roles or have left the organization.

1 Note: In Dan Galorath’s blog.

http://www.galorath.com/wp/software-project-failure-costs-billions-better-estimation-planning-can-help.php


To address all of the issues presented above, Bamboo Solutions has pioneered a portfolio of commercially-tested SharePoint components that can be deployed by non-programmers. Bamboo has architected these components to “snap together” into Solution Frameworks that support the growing breadth and complexity of SharePoint-based applications.

From Bamboo Solutions’ perspective, each category of software within a Solution Frame-work should solve a tactical problem in its own right, but also integrate into a complete set of capabilities that allow you to use SharePoint over a broad set of use cases:

• Individual Web Parts (components) and/or cloud services for SharePoint (Cloud Parts®). These are the individual software building blocks that can be put together and configured to help create unique solutions, but that tend to be functional and highly spe-cific in nature;

• Business Process and/or Workflow auto-mation. Tools that allow you to more easily define and automate business processes in SharePoint, including decisions related to each process;

• Management Tools such as systems man-agement, user management, content admin-istration, archival and systems analysis;

• Migration and Integration tools both within SharePoint, and between SharePoint and external environments;

• Purpose-built business applications. For example, Project Management, Social Soft-ware, Community Management, Document Management, Document Conversion, and Knowledge Management.

The number of software vendor offerings in the marketplace has become quite large2. Many of these suppliers focus on one area, while others, particularly in the purpose-built applica-tion category, will focus on specific business use cases where their domain knowledge is particularly strong.

Bamboo’s approach has been to develop Web Parts as part of a Solution Framework that allows our customers to deploy a broad set of use cases. We’ve added integrated process automation capabilities through our Work-flow Conductor™ and the basic systems and management capabilities that will support our customer’s solutions that are built upon our software. In those areas most often requested, we have added purpose-built applications, each of which are built upon the underlying Bamboo Web Parts. As a result, whether our customers use components within a Solutions Framework and configure them to their needs, or deploy purpose-built applications and configure them, the same synergistic library of components are available to be used in new ways as needs grow over time.

A Quantitative Evaluation: Solution Framework vs. Custom-coding

Application Development By configuring commercial Web Parts instead of custom-coding, teams decrease the num-ber of developer days required by changing the mix of effort from software development to configuration. The following example illustrates

Using Commercial Solution Frameworks to Extend SharePoint

2 See Appendix A for a representative list


Ongoing Software SupportAnnual software support costs will likewise be dramatically lower when you can use off–the-shelf software vs. custom-developed software. Using the project illustrated above:

the cost comparison between these two ap-proaches.

A reasonable estimate of senior engineer to developer time for a SharePoint application development and deployment project is 1:5 for a typical custom-software project. By using a framework of configurable software compo-nents, that ratio should improve from 1:5 to 1:2.5 since the project team can spend less time on time-consuming programming tasks and more time on design, architecture, change management, and other activities that factor in the long-term project cost and success.

As an example, assume that over the course of a year an organization develops two ap-plications that require custom coding and four applications that use SharePoint out-of-the-box. The example fully-burdened internal cost of a Sr. Engineer is $ 100/hr., and the fully burdened cost of a more junior developer or business analyst is $ 70/hr. Using the ratios above, the total development costs of using SharePoint out-of-the-box along with custom development over 12 months would be $ 182,000 and require 240 FTE days to comple-tion (Table 1). Using commercial off-the-shelf components, the same projects would be com-pleted at a savings of $ 98,000 and result in a 42% time savings if commercial off-the-shelf software were used effectively (Table 2).

Table 1. Project Costs without Bamboo Web Parts

Table 2. Project Costs with Bamboo Web Parts

Table 3. Annual Support without Bamboo Web Parts


Of course, in any specific analysis you must also factor in the license costs for any com-mercial product. When adding these costs, a typical time to payback can easily be nine to twelve months, even when not taking into con-sideration any assumptions related to project risks or software development risks as outlined earlier. Creating Corporate Value through Custom SoftwareA final consideration in making the license vs. build decision is whether custom software developed for a specific project would actually add to corporate value. In his book Dealing with Darwin , author Geoffrey Moore argues that all sustaining corporate value comes from differentiation vs. others in the marketplace. Projects that provide such differentiation can be considered “core” to a company’s strategy, while anything that does not create differentia-tion, even when there is short-term financial ROI, will fail to create added value long-term. Note that such projects may actually be mission-critical (e.g., you must do them just to remain competitive!) but strategically they re-main essentially hygienic, or what Moore calls “context” activities.

Core today naturally becomes context over time since your competitors continue to inno-vate. Hence the challenge discussed by the author is how to best free up the management time and attention that you presently spend on required context in order to invest more into core activities that better increase overall corporate value.

This adds a strategic perspective that goes be-yond the short-term dollars and cents:

a. Is the software development project un-der consideration providing unique differ-entiation that is core to your company’s business strategy? Or is it in support of critical hygiene (context)? If the project is focused in an area where manage-ment has decided to invest over the long term to remain differentiated from other similar companies in your business, then you may have identified a core part of your strategy where the decision to invest in custom software over time, to retain maximum flexibility and to create unique differentiation with the solution may be a sound choice regardless of short-term costs.

b. Otherwise, even if your custom software project solves a mission-critical need, un-less your company has made the strate-gic commitment to differentiate long-term through a software development compe-tency, using as much off-the-shelf capa-bilities as possible will likely be the better choice, both because of the quantitative cost savings and the fact that the man-agement time and attention required to manage custom software development projects and endure the risks is simply better spent on the core elements of your business.

Table 4. Annual Support With Bamboo Web Parts

10©

2011, Bamboo Solutions C

orporation

Append

ix A: Representative List of Softw

are Vend

ors in the SharePoint Marketplace


i Global 360 Inc., How are businesses using Microsoft SharePoint in the Enterprise? http://global360.com/xres/uploads/resource-center-documents/012811_WhitePaper_SharePoint_Survey_2011-B.pdf (© 2001)

ii Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM), AIIM Market Intelligence: SharePoint Strategies and Experiences, http://www.aiim.org/Research/Industry-Watch/SharePoint-2010 (© 2010)

iii Carmine Mangione, Software Project Failure: The Reasons, The Costs, CIO Update, http://www.cioupdate.com/reports/article.php/1563701/Software-Project-Failure-The-Reasons-The-Costs.htm (January 3, 2003)

iv “The CHAOS report;” © 2011; The Standish Group International; http://www.standishgroup.com/

v “2010 IT Project Success Rates”; Dr. Dobbs; © 2011 UBM Techweb; Original article August 02, 2010; Scott W. Ambler; http://drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/226500046;

v Geoffrey A Moore, Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, (New York, NY: The Penguin Group, 2005) © Geoffrey A. Moore, 2005

About Bamboo Solutions Bamboo Solutions, a Microsoft Gold-certified partner, is a leading provider of software that helps organizations achieve business value leveraging Microsoft SharePoint. Bamboo offers its extensive library of Web Parts and tools and applications for SharePoint for use on-premises, or as on-demand applications. Over 6,500 organizations worldwide have chosen to implement solutions using Bamboo software. Bamboo Solutions is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, USA with offices in San Mateo, California, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. For more information or to browse Bamboo’s interactive catalog of SharePoint technologies, please visit http://www.bamboosolutions.com.

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SummaryThe SituationStrategic Fit

SharePoint Solution Implementation Challenges and RisksImplementation Costs and Schedules: Go-live or Escape?Planning and StaffingDevelopment and Deployment Risks

Using Commercial Solution Frameworks to Extend SharePointA Quantitative Evaluation: Solution Framework vs. Custom-codingApplication Development Ongoing Software Support

Creating Corporate Value through Custom Software

Documents

WHITE PAPER Build vs. Buy - Bamboo Solutions - SharePoint ...store.bamboosolutions.com/BambooMainWeb/documents/...In the first study, a variety of barriers such as end user adoption,