An impressive IT strategy model known as Geographically Distributed Development or GDD is becoming a valuable ally for businesses in industrialized nations all over the world. GDD is taking the place of archaic business methodologies that utilize one or multiple project sites, resulting in minimized efficiency and compromised success. GDD delivers benefits that include:

• Decreased labor costs
• Maximized access to highly-trained resources
• Less time-to-market with flexible, 24/7 staffing

GDD allows organizations in any location to immediately respond to business changes as they emerge.

In order for GDD to operate at full-potential, substantial hindrances must be eradicated or maximally reduced within the GDD strategy. Businesses embedded in a globally-distributed market possess inherent and significant expenses associated with communication and coordination logistics. Businesses must find strategies that will combat those costs since they can oppose the very benefits GDD provides. On-going challenges include cultural and language differences as well as staff having little or no access to information that must be presented in a timely fashion to meet deadlines. All these issues endanger the success of distributed projects.

With the GDD model, team-members can be located anywhere in the world; and whether separated by state lines or oceans and continents, the development of a company's project can be implemented with the highest-degree of cohesiveness and efficiency. Software-development projects can include multiple sites as well as outsourced companies. All sites would work in synchronized fashion on the development of a project's varied components within the software's project-development lifecycle.

The GDD model targets two major considerations within the enterprise: optimized communication between team-members and unified project coordination. These two factors must be in place to help deal with business mandates that include: global sourcing, service-oriented architecture, new compliance requirements, new development procedures, shortened release cycles and extended application lifetimes. Businesses needs require mission-critical solutions that will effectively:

• Deliver global visibility, to management, regarding change activities across distributed teams
• Coordinate and automate consistent change processes and best practices within the enterprise
• Manage the distribution of dependent change components throughout platforms and teams
• Safeguard intellectual property
• Track and Authenticate Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

An Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) solution enables companies to successfully manage and enhance the breadth and quality of communication for all stakeholders in the change process. Challenges embedded in geographically distributed environments are to be reckoned with, and include: language boundaries, cultural differences, dissimilar software-development methods, change-management requisites, security enforcement, adaptations regarding industry protocol, and client business mandates. The ALM solution very effectively meets these crucial areas.

Deliver Global Visibility, to Management, Regarding Change Activities Across Distributed Teams
ALM's centralized repository is invaluable since it allows all activities, communications and artifacts to be viewed at any time at will. Activities, communications and artifacts can be affected by the change process; and the central repository permits the viewing of project activities related to individual developers, development groups or project teams, regardless of geographic location, platform and development environment. The impressive benefits of the centralized repository become striking when one contrasts this with most distributed environments where individual teams possess their own code repository, preventing visibility of work-in-progress across teams.

Management can track and verify project status via the ALM solution. It is then that managers can authenticate and ensure the completion of assigned tasks. Management can be quickly alerted when processes slow down thanks to dashboards that display information in an easy-to-recognize configuration.

Due to maximized synchronization between local and remote development activities, development goals can be continually met. Data collected by ALM will enhance project management, status tracking, traceability and resource distribution. Over time, generated reports permit the collection and analysis of process metrics used to continually optimize development procedures. Additionally, the ALM solution will allow regulatory and best-practices compliance to be monitored and evaluated. Compliance deals with the set-up of germane processes and creating any required reports. ALM structures the compliance strategy; and allows applicable historical information to be viewed, regardless of users' locations.

Coordinate and Automate Consistent Change Processes and Best Practices within the Enterprise
Companies can establish clear, repeatable, measureable and traceable processes based on best practices due to the simplicity ALM offers during every stage of application development. Point-and-click functions allow users to very easily create a portfolio of authorized processes which can automate assigned tasks and the movement of application artifacts.

Change management becomes simplified due to ALM's streamlining regarding changes and required actions, enabling changes to be scrutinized and prioritized. The approval management functions demand that official verification be staunchly in place prior to any changes moving forward. ALM's tracking of software changes are performed with ease by way of the ALM's automated logging functions. Changes can be traced starting with a request being received up to a solution being presented to production.

Staff within the global development team would be notified of any assigned tasks as well as circumstances that could impact their efforts.

Manage the Distribution of Dependent Change Components throughout Platforms and Teams
As the enterprise becomes increasingly interlinked, changes occurring in one system can also impact other systems. ALM's multi-platform support means changes made on desperate platforms, among geographically-distributed teams, can travel through the application lifecycle, compatibly and collectively. A BOMP, or Bill of Materials Processor, serves as an on-board feature purposed to generate file portfolios that combine features from multiple platforms. As a result, file portfolios can to travel through the lifecycle as a combined unit. Also, various ALM solutions guarantee that parts integrated into the assemblies are situated within the corresponding platforms during every phase of the lifecycle.

Safeguard Intellectual Property
Protecting all managed artifacts involves garrisoned access and function control. An ALM solution offers unparalleled protection by operating on a role-based access-control system. Managers can effortlessly, yet securely, control any portal to intellectual property; and administration is not obliged to grant individual rights to each user. Thanks to the role-based structuring, administrative operations are performed with ease; and a transparent description of access rights is provided to groups of team-members.

Track and Authenticate Service Level Agreements
General project plans must satisfy deadlines while enforcing accountability for agreed-upon deliveries. The ALM solution meets a variety of specific needs including: 1) tracking and verifying tasks and processes 2) ensuring assignments are properly performed and 3) assisting with meeting Service Level Agreement (SLA) demands within an outsourcing contract. Assigned tasks to developers are flawlessly coordinated with tasks that are a part of a project plan; and this optimizes the tracking of targeted achievements. An additional ALM feature allows reports to be generated which dependably track response and resolution times. Service level workflows provide flexibility and automate service processes. In turn, this results in a quickening of processes to respective resources which helps meet project deadlines. An assortment of reports and dashboards efficiently track performance with service level agreements.

Optimize Your Geographically Distributed Development
Reaping the full benefits of GDD means the caliber of communication and coordination must be enhanced. When this takes place, management strategies can be utilized to deal with obstacles that can compromise a company's level of success. ALM's centralized repository presents ideas, designs, dialogue, requirements, tasks and an array of other information at one's fingertips. Development processes and tasks are automated, coordinated and monitored via ALM's workflow capabilities with every bit of intellectual property being vitally protected within the central repository. Project managements is impressively synchronized due to local and remote software development that is highly coordinated. Cohesiveness regarding monitoring, tracking, auditing of reports, and dashboards all function together, seamlessly, to satisfy crucial deadlines. ALM caters to organizations where mission-critical solutions meet mission-critical needs, head on!

Application Lifecycle Management Solutions
ALM management platforms provide a comprehensive menu of enterprise software and configuration-management facilities. Through ALM, solutions will automate and enforce consistent service delivery processes within enterprise organizations. Those same solutions will support the numerous needs of any number of GDD groups that can take full advantage of ALM's abilities to: 1) target permission-based assignment and enforcement services 2) provide role-based interfaces that support developers, software engineers, project managers, IT professionals and other skilled specialists 3) deliver enterprise application inventory-management services 4) coordinate enormous software inventories and configurations 5) control user access 6) manage a variety of application code 7) maintain simultaneous development projects and 8) manage multiple release-management facilities.