Selling the benefits of Team System

I have found that there is very little content available on the art of selling Team System for developers that want to use it. Developers need to sell it not only to their manager, but to a hole host of people, and it is no small expense to implement it.

There needs to be some sort of content available to help sell this product, and I mean without trawling through hundreds of MSDN pages, case studies and blogs. Lets face it, if you tell someone a piece of software is good and give them some content, what is the likelihood that they will read it… Zip, that how likely it is.

The fact is that you not only need to sell this to your management, you need to get every member of the program teams to buy into it as well. This includes Developers, Business Analysts, Project Manager, Testers and Managers, and this is not easy.

You need an angle for each of these groups and you need to be able talk to each of their needs and concerns. It is a full time job trying to sell Team System to your team. On the upside, if you convince the teams the managers will follow, if only to shut everyone up. I would suggest getting a trial copy of Team Foundation Server setup under the auspicious title of “Proof-Of-Concept” that will allow you to demo the product. And remember if you go down this root, Team Foundation Server will be your life: Selling, Deployment, Configuration and Customization… It is never ending.

My advice is to start small, deploy team server and get it working for you and a few select others. Then get the project managers on board and wow them with reports, even if you have to update Team Foundation Server yourself and keep it in line with their excel lists of bugs, tasks, risks and issues.

Forget getting Team Suit or even Team Editions, at £7000 and £2500 respectively these costs are just to prohibitive, you will have enough on your plate getting £2200 per server and £300 per CAL off your budget.

And Remember: If you build it, they will come.

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