Initiated by Iterate, and developed by some highly proficient and devoted students at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, the MMF planner is a proud example of how technological talent and lean development practices produce excellent results.

So what is the MMF planner? What is an MMF? And most important: How does it help a software development team in their persuit for delivering business value? The answer to these questions lies in how we organize our development projects, both methodologically and financially.

Have you ever been in a situation where everybody agrees that a certain piece of software would significantly improve the efficiency of your work? The only problem is that we don’t have the money to develop it?

Or did you ever fret about how a bidding process forces you to cut price estimates beyond recognition to match those of your overzealous competitors?

Wouldn’t it be a lot better to tell your leaders or your customers that you don’t need the estimated n millions to deliver the software they ask for. Moreover, you are not going to cut corners just to force down the cost a few percent. Instead, you ask for a tenth of the estimated initial investment. You use this to commence an iterative development project that focuses on minimum marketable features eventually make the project self funding.

The idea is as simple as it is efficient: Organize your development project so that you continuously develop, test and deploy feature sets that are able to deliver business value independently. As your feature sets - we call them minimum marketable feature sets (MMFs) - go into production, the organization that uses them start to either save money or make money. In subsequent iterations, the project is funded by the very money it generated, thereby eliminating the need for a large up-front investment.

So what’s the role of the MMF planner? Sure, MMF-thinking sounds clever, but do we really need a tool to support MMF projects? In our opinion the answer is yes. Let’s face it: Software developers are good at software development. Economists are good at economics. This is however insufficient when taking the entire value chain into account. To deliver outstanding projects, developers and economists have to work together, and they need help to accomplish this cooperation.

The MMF planner is a tool that produces the figures needed to persuade your customer, and the dependency graph needed to commence an iterative, MMF-oriented project. Moreover, it shows you key metrics such as cash flow, up front investments with all figures adjusted for present value. Those are figures the developers need to persuade their leaders. The leaders need them to persuade the customer. And the customer needs them to tell the developers what to do. In its simplest version, this could have been placed in a complicated spreadsheet. We believe however, that a genuine tool made to support this thinking gives several advantages. It visualizes dependencies and draws out the big picture in an intuitive manner. It provides you with the “packaging” you need to convince people around you. And it gives you confidence that figures are accurate, that you are on the right track, financially as well as technically.

We urge all our visitors to launch the MMF Planner, use it, come back to us with feedback and even better: Contribute to the project as an open source developer.