Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
SPR is fairly typical of hundreds of startups that grow using the founder's own
revenues rather than external venture funding. Friends and colleagues who started
venture-backed companies in the same year that SPR was founded all eventually
left and their companies filed for bankruptcy due in part to questionable decisions
made by the venture groups.
Some venture-backed companies succeed and grow to become major corpora-
tions, but many others are pushed too fast in the wrong direction and end up fail-
ing.
Although I retired from SPR in 2000, the company is still doing well and is
expanding into South America. The current commercial estimation tool of SPR is
called KnowledgePLAN, and it includes very detailed activity- and task-based es-
timation.
One unusual aspect of SPR after the sale to Artemis is that when Artemis itself
encountered a business slowdown, the employees of SPR acquired the company,
with Doug Brindley as the current President. Doug had been the GM corporate
contact in the tax litigation involving EDS, so he was familiar with the SPR tech-
nology.
The assessment and benchmark consulting business started at SPR was so suc-
cessful that two former SPR Vice Presidents of Consulting started their own com-
panies and continue to operate in the areas of function point analysis and bench-
mark data collection. These two companies are the David's Consulting Group and
the Quality/Productivity Management Group.
Stepstone Corporation
Stepstone Corporation was founded in 1983 in Newtown, Connecticut, by Dr. Tom
Love and Dr. Brad Cox with other colleagues who had worked at ITT Corpora-
tion's Programming Technology Center in nearby Stratford, Connecticut. It was
originally called Productivity Products International (PPI).
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