It should come as some small consolation to know that we are not alone in our struggles. A study, "Planning for Lotus Notes", co-published by Earley & Associates, Inc. and Sage Research, Inc., observes that of one hundred and sixty-nine businesses that have implemented Lotus Notes, "Insufficient programming resources" was identified as the number one shortcoming of the Notes environment! This report makes for highly informative reading. Although the full report is not available online, for more information about this study go to http://www.earley.com and tell 'em Richard sent 'ya.

At the company where I work, Tactica Technology Group, we have over a dozen full-time Lotus Notes developers. These developers work on a variety of projects both large and small with time-lines ranging from days to multiple man months for complex integration and multi-domain development projects. With the costs of salary and benefits for skilled consultants like these, every efficiency gain that we can make goes almost directly to the bottom line of our business. It was with this realization that we began a process of trying to improve our developer's productivity.

Over the course of the next few months, I'll be sharing with you the steps that we took to improve the reliability, performance, and maintainability of our internal applications as well as those that we develop for our clients. With this information, you can put processes and procedures into place that will enable your Notes developers to get more work done faster and have your Notes investment deliver an unquestionable ROI impact for your business.

Step 1: Decide who's going to staff the project
The first step that we took was to form a panel of developers, project managers, Notes administrators and business leaders who would drive and be responsible for the successful completion of this project. It is vitally important to have not only project managers but the front line developers and administrators involved from the very beginning of this process. This helps to achieve "buy-in" from the developers as well as have them feel more vested in the final development process.