Part #4:  Professional services - also optional

For businesses that provide customer-specific product customizations, the approach with conventional software development is often to create a professional services organization that allocates a team of developers to each customization. While this approach offers opportunities for revenue, it also comes with significant drawbacks such as the overhead of building and sustaining a professional services organization and an ever-growing body of "one-off" products that are difficult to maintain and upgrade.

What happens with the software development approach when customer-specific customizations can be viewed as just another commodity product in the portfolio? What happens when the time, cost and effort required to create and maintain these customizations are all reduced by 90 percent?

A leaner and more agile business model is created to provide customized products in less time and at lower cost.

The power of the portfolio for customer-specific customizations is that each new product can be viewed as just another "commodity member" of the portfolio. In some cases, this can offer a leaner and more agile option to the professional services business model.

Real-world Example

A technology startup, and BigLever client, decided to utilize a software product line approach rather than a professional services business model to provide customer-specific customizations. After proving its business model, the startup began negotiating an M&A opportunity with a large company. During this period, a small outsourced development team was able to maintain the company's entire product line portfolio.

According to the CEO, a conventional professional services model would have required 10 times the burn rate and would have prevented the company from surviving the M&A process. From the perspective of the investors, the company's use of a software product line approach produced a dramatically better financial outcome than would have been possible had the company relied on conventional methods.

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