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<<The company is actually implementing a Relational Rose system into
which all the requirements, business, functions, and technical
support are supposed to reside. That should make it much easier to
hunt and kill the info.
Of course, Rose is not a system that is implemented casually by an
independent user. So it may not be applicable to you.>>
If you're using what I think you're using, it's the Rational tool suite, of
which Rose is only a part. Rational Rose is used to model business processes
(and you're right--not designed for the casual, independent user). Another
component, RequisitePro, is used to capture and track requirements, which
can be used to build use cases. ClearCase is the configuration management
tool, which is used to control version releases. ClearQuest is what I think
you're referring to in terms of "technical support"--it's a sort of
"trouble-ticket" (request tracking) tool.
We're adapting Rational tools to our implementation of an ISO 9000-compliant
quality management system. Rose has been great for process mapping, and we
plan to use ClearCase for documentation management and ClearQuest for a
couple of our processes that require tracking an activity through various
stages. As part of our document management plan, we're going to have a Web
interface to a shared directory--everyone in the department will have at
least read access to all projects. It's not all implemented yet, but looks
very promising thus far.
As for Kevin's quandary, Rational might be a way to go, but it would take a
lot of planning, and probably buy-in from the whole Engineering group to
really make it work well. One plus is that Rational includes the Rational
Unified Process, so that the various parts of a project can be linked across
the tool set; and, it allegedly allows you to attach e-mail messages to
project documents. It's also integrated with Word, and possibly (I can't
remember for sure) with Microsoft Project.
HTH
Julie
+--------------------------------------------------+
| Julie Pitt Digex, Inc. |
| ISO Implementation Coordinator One Digex Plaza |
| Digex Consulting Beltsville, MD 20705 |
+--------------------------------------------------+
| Julie -dot- Pitt -at- Digex -dot- com http://www.digex.com |
+--------------------------------------------------+
IPCC 01, the IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
October 24-27, 2001 at historic La Fonda in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
CALL FOR PAPERS OPEN UNTIL MARCH 15. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
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