We're still in the first few weeks of company launch but I'm throwing out a tentative roadmap for the year. At this point, everything is geared around building and shipping a high-end portfolio management system. I'm not in a hurry, like I was throughout most of Techfi's existence. The emphasis now is more on getting things right the first time and building a fast, stable, and scalable framework for future development.
In fact for the first six months, we're going to be working almost excusively on the portfolio management engine. We're making sure the core accounting engine, performance calculations, and general data management are completely rock solid before moving on to screens and reports.
The downside is that we won't have much to show anybody until we're well into development. There are other reasons for that, not the least of which is our plan to use Microsoft's new Silverlight 2.0 which isn't ready yet. I'm working on some screen mockups that I'll post soon, but we won't have real screens for months.
January - February (Data)
Our first job is to get a handle on Microsoft Entity Framework, write our base objects and create the data access layer. Since we've built these systems before, this should only take a couple weeks. However, Entity Framework is a pre-beta product and it's taking us longer than we'd hoped.
February - May (Core Engine)
Next we start working on the core accounting engine which encompasses cost calculations, rates of return, and the Account-Transaction-TaxLot structure. We're planning on making our cost calculations sensitive to all the various capital gain tax laws so I'm expecting this to take a long time. This is also where we'll create the transaction codes, data rollups and row-level security.
At this point we'll work out specifics of how the platform extensibility works. Right now we have a vague concept of having numerous plug-in points throughout the software where a third party developer (or our professional services team) could create custom extensions. We plan to establish these interfaces early and use them in our own development.
May - July (Frontend)
The next big phase of the project is to get a handle on our frontend GUI, tentatively slated to be Microsoft Silverlight 2.0. This is one of the bigger risks we're taking and we expect it to take some time. The end goal here is to have the basic structure of an app, where you can see a list of clients/accounts, open them up and edit them.
July - October (Portfolio Management)
Now that we have a solid framework, we can start layering in all the stuff that makes this a portfolio management system. Rebalancing, billing, reports, interfaces, error checking. This is a fairly tedious part of the process (from a development perspective) but we expect to have more resources by then. It's also fairly straightforward so there shouldn't be any surprises.
October - December (Beta)
FinFolio should be starting to look like a real portfolio management system by now. We'll start to shift into beta mode which means we'll be writing conversions for our beta testers, ghosting their interface feeds, and generally doing the thorough in-house testing that's needed before we can release the software. We'll also start creating the online help.
By the end of the year, we hope to have several advisory firms using the beta software. I think they'll probably be running parallel systems at least through the end of the year but I wouldn't be surprised to see one or two people go live.
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There you go. I'll probably look back on these specific time frames and regret this post. But there's a lot of padding in there so if it slips, it shouldn't be by much.