MCLEAN, Virginia – QSM, Inc., a leader in software and systems development estimation, planning, and project management, today announced that they have upgraded their integration of SLIM-Control to support IBM Rational Team Concert V3.0.1.

Rational Team Concert provides a unique team collaborative development environment enabling productivity and quality in modern software development. Project data in Team Concert, such as Work Items (stories planned; stories completed) and Quality (defects found; defects corrected) can be retrieved by QSM’s SLIM-Control to perform its project analysis:

• Variance analysis assesses project health and progress
• Adaptive forecasts-to-complete based on progress metrics indicated

“With SLIM-Control, our goal is to help our clients track their projects to their estimates and allow them to adapt as necessary,” says Larry Putnam, Jr., Co-CEO of QSM. “This integration allows users to bring their project data in RTC into SLIM-Control so they can quickly and easily forecast alternatives.”

“QSM’s offering, with its proven track record,” said Michael Loria, Vice President of IBM Rational Business Development, “operating on real project data in Rational Team Concert, can help our clients negotiate achievable goals, set realistic expectations and communicate more effectively with colleagues and customers in an increasingly collaborative fashion.”

QSM and IBM Rational are pleased to announce yet another point of integration between SLIM and Rational tools.  Most projects overrun their schedules and budgets because of the lack of good estimates at the time commitments are made.  Project and portfolio management tools like Rational Focal Point are useful to analyze proposals and help build a solid business case on which to base project approvals.  These products focus primarily on justifying the project through the business benefits and/or savings derived from the implementation of the proposal’s business requirements.  They do not assess the risk of failing to meet a business stakeholder’s desired project schedule and budget in a proposal.  QSM’s integration to Rational Focal Point brings this powerful capability to market and helps identify high risk proposals before they enter an organization’s project stream.  This capability can significantly reduce schedule slippage and cost overruns that can reach tens of millions of dollars for many large Fortune 1000 organizations.

Read more about the SLIM-Estimate and Rational Focal Point integration here or you can read more about QSM's IBM Rational Solutions on our Partners Page.