Companies, in the drive to produce new capabilities in their software product and roll them out to the market, run into conflicting priorities. One priority is to keep Development producing new features, where the key is meeting announced dates and moving on to work on the next version. The other priority is for Production to move customers up to the newest software, where the priority has to be doing it at the right time, and doing it right.

When you provide hosted software, you add yet another dimension to the mix. Unlike installed software, where you can send out CDs and let the customers drive their own upgrades, you have to deal with both conflicting priorities, namely Development and Production, because your company has taken on a role that software companies didn’t traditionally have to deal with. That is the role of implementation and production manager, which entails very different priorities from a software developer.

Read on below for a discussion of how these two priorities push and pull you in two different directions and how to handle them.