10 SCOPE is an investment in the future of an FP Program

Background

In our experience of 20 years implementing measurement programs across the world, eighty percent of them fail to exist beyond 2 years. Failure to succeed, is for many reasons but one of the major ones is that organisations fail to plan their investment and ensure that their strategy is scalable and that they have invested in the right training and tools to ensure the ongoing success.

Microsoft Excel Counting

FPA Excel spreadsheets used by different organisations tend to have different layouts and content making it impossible for proprietary tools to automate the import of data at some time in the future when the organisation decides to take the next step and invest in a tool. Most of the current FPA specialist tools have inbuilt functions to import from a spreadsheet but the format of the spreadsheet is predefined. Therefore if an organisation decides to move to a proprietary tool there are often significant costs in transforming their own FPA spreadsheet data to a format that can be imported. In addition all the current tools only allow one spreadsheet at a time to be imported so even after the transformation, it is a significantly time intensive effort to manually import hundreds of counts and then check that they have imported correctly. Often valuable information is lost because it is stored as a concatenated text string rather than as a separate cell and the importing software is unable to decode it. It typically consumes around 1 hour per count per application to transform and import an Excel count into a tool such as SCOPE. This may translate to hundreds of hours (100 hours @$50/hr = $5,000) which could have been avoided if the tool had been purchased at the start of the function point counting activity.

SCOPE Counting

SCOPE has functions to import spreadsheets from SCOPE's spreadsheet template. Total Metrics is available to provide support to organisations requiring transforming their existing data into SCOPE. SCOPE is the only specially designed function point counting tool that also has the capability to import all count data from older previous generation function point counting tools such as the Function Point WORKBENCH™