When Hauduc took over the position of GM in January 2007, he wasn't exactly unfamiliar with the product line. A Microsoft hire right out of college in France in the early 1990s he joined the Project team seven full releases ago. Now, he says, his job is "to ensure customer success on the product, listen to feedback, and introduce feedback into the next version of Project."
That last point was the second of two main points for Hauduc's session -- the first being a major focus on quality.
Traditionally, he said, the Project team would maintain a queue of issues to be addressed in the next update, in a first-in first-out basis. But shortly after releasing SP1 for Project 2007, the team began to explore how it could optimize its internal processes in order to batch customer needs from a "scenario basis."
"We decided to identify top areas that had to be truly fixed in a deep way," explained Hauduc. In other words, they'd seek out themes to be addressed, such as timesheets, queue management, caching, custom fields, and the like. In fact, the Infrastructure Update, which appeared in July 2008, addressed nine or 10 such areas. Where did the themes come from? According to Hauduc, the Project developers have been talking with MVPs, partners and "field folks."
At the same time, the standard testing and quality assurance approach -- which previously matched development time hour for hour -- now had a two-for-one ratio, two hours of testing for every hour of development. Likewise, the same team that built the product was going to be responsible for fixing any problems that surfaced in releases.
These changes in process have been followed for a slew of updates, which are now delivered bi-monthly. The latest one appeared in October. The next one is due in December.
Premium customers can get the cumulative updates. The rest of us have to wait for roll-ups, such as service pack 2, which is scheduled to surface in 1Q09.
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