Process mature organizations do not think process is a dirty word. Unfortunately many other organizations have been victims of half-hearted attempts to simply adopt the flavour-of-the-day methodology as their de-facto process without adequate focus on enactment.

My experience working with process mature enterprise organizations has been that a successful process definition really starts when you start thinking about the enactment scenarios it is trying to address. Simply put, convincing a business sponsor that processes are important and worth investing into, is easier when you articulate the advantages it will have on project success. Moreover this assessment has to be data-based and not subjective. Let me take an example from software development to further detail this idea.

It is now widely accepted that design and development go hand in hand. After a designer comes up with software design it is not uncommon (in fact it is expected) for the development team to uncover gaps and further improve design as they go about implementing it. It would be unrealistic to expect the design document to be complete even before writing the first line of code based on it. The same applies to the world of process definition and enactment.

In my view it is not possible to come up with a sustainable process definition without enacting it in real projects. Unless project teams try to enact the defined processes, they cannot uncover process gaps. Unfortunately this is also the reason why in many organizations process has become a dirty word. There have been many anecdotal stories about how someone (usually a consultant from or trained in the latest methodology fad) would create a process (mostly solo with just token efforts to involve all stakeholders) and toss that over to the development team, collect his/her cheque and leave. At best the knowledge workers (I would characterize all practioners in a software development project as knowledge workers) would take a look at this process binder and throw it over to the trash bin. At worst they would try to follow the process in the absence of a process enactment framework in place, fail, and become demotivated vowing never to follow similar imposed processes in future. In both cases the project schedule languishes and help of “hero” practioners is needed to save the project. But how are process mature companies managing their processes and enactment?

To begin with, these enterprises realize that process creation should not be a single user effort. The process management infrastructure should lower the barrier of participation by enabling all stakeholders to collaboratively come up with processes. For an enterprise with a number of teams spread across different time zones this would mean:
- Collaborating while managing a process infrastructure built on a commonly understood, uncomplicated process meta-model that supports all methodologies including home grown.
- Supporting the creation of a process architecture that would map to the organization structure with access control granting visibility into process assets and promote reuse.
- Representing process assets in relational databases allowing subject matter experts to keep updating the vast pool of best practices that is impossible to manage in a file-based system.
- Provisioning a visual, intuitive user interface to create processes. No one wants to spend weeks to understand how to extend an activity.

Putting in place a process management infrastructure is just half the story. Process mature organizations would ensure that the processes created in a manner defined above are validated for enactment. This means an automated mechanism to check for holes in the process, such as usage of work products that become outdated as the process was being developed. Having done that it is time to enact these processes. It is during process enactment that teams would uncover what is missing in their processes. Lessons learned as part of a successful or unsuccessful implementation would provide rich data to improve these processes and institutionalize the lessons across the enterprise. Compliancy reporting would mean teams can self-audit how far/away are they from meeting the compliance points as laid out in the defined process. Finally, with data-based process interventions and the empowerment of project practioners the chances of project success keep getting higher with successive implementations.

So why has Osellus invested more than four years in this process enactment domain and is introducing our second generation enactment tooling later this month. Here are a few reasons:

- Process enactment is emerging as the new frontier in software development process world. Standards such as ISO/IEC 24744 already taking lead in this area. The Osellus SPEM 2.0 submission had enactment as a cornerstone of the process meta-model. There is a strong demand from process mature organizations to address this need.
- Enables wider (more practitioners empowered with buy-in) and deeper (actual “consumption” of processes in real projects) process adoption.
- Increases chances of better software quality since the best practices and guidances are viewed in terms of enactment/endeavor domain on real projects and not just published binders/websites.
- Lays the groundwork for gathering metrics on project health, process compliancy (regulatory and quality frameworks) and data-based process improvement decisions.

In a later post, I am going to share a bit more about the second generation process enactment infrastructure we have built. This draws from direct feedback from enterprise teams as well as our own lessons learned from our first generation tooling around enactment.

Let’s face it. Many of us have worked in teams/organizations that at some time or the other have said “lets-fix-the-processes-we-follow-around-here”. Unfortunately, based on my knowledge most of these initiatives don’t live up to their promise (or the money spent on them!) despite the investments in consultants, methodology-licenses or books. It is not that we don’t have the skills to come up with a process. It is the nature of software development which in most enterprises is a collaborative team based activity that has proven to be difficult to predict (I wont go into all the reasons here - changing requirements, schedules, technology, nature of knowledge workers). A static one-time (often one-person!) effort to come up with a process and then throwing it over to the wider team (in the form of documents or published websites) is doomed from the get-go. In fact in my personal view, in the absence of sustainable plan to collaboratively manage and then operationalize your process assets, this is a colossal waste of resources.

Over the next few weeks and months I will outline how process-mature organizations can take a pioneering role by setting up a sustainable process infrastructure that results in demonstrable gains to their project sponsors/stakeholders. I will also list some organizations that are in the process of doing so or are simply taking a tactical decision to recoup their costly investments in methodology by moving to operationalize them.

Microsoft has just unveiled Silverlight.

“Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.”

For product companies that rely on rich interactive applications in their tools/services this is a significent development and I am sure they are are going to closely follow the details being released by Microsoft over the next few weeks.

The solutions offered by Osellus have always been methodology-agnostic. We continue to have the same approach going into the second generation process authoring/automation tooling introduced by us. 

One example of this is our ongoing efforts to create and offer an OpenUP/Basic VSTS process template. This will be helpful to teams that are using VSTS as the development platform of choice and would like to use a methodology such as OpenUP/Basic during enactment. As you know, Content Bridge for VSTS already offers an easy low-overhead way to move RUP content into VSTS. 

I believe that by extending Content Bridge to support EPF processes customers will have a choice that results in significent cost saving while ensuring wider inter-operatibility between processes and execution environments. Stay tuned for more announcements on this in the coming weeks.

We are moving to a new blogging platform! Our software of choice - Wordpress. The blog already looks and works so much better but please bear with us for the next couple of weeks while we smith Osellus blogs to make your reading experience more enjoyable and engaging.

We are officially releasing Content Bridge for VSTS ! Here is the full press release.

Here is some more information in Content Bridge for VSTS:

http://www.osellus.com/products/contentbridge/contentbridge_for_vsts.html

There were 1548 attendees at the SEPG event this year. Most of them are involved in some kind of process - definition, management or improvement - activities in the organizations they represent. Many of the visitors to the Microsoft booth were already aware of advanced process-specific capabilities introduced by Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). This was a good opportunity for the partners in the VSTS eco-system to showcase their offerings in this area.

For Osellus this meant highlighting IRIS Process Author with its collaborative, enterprise-grade process architecting capabilities. The feedback received from visitors to the booth was a good validation of the single-minded focus we have in providing a team-based un-complicated way to author or tailor processes. Our methodology-agnostic approach means we support processes based on homegrown methodologies or well-known methodologies and frameworks such as MSF, RUP, Macroscope, EssUP, ITIL and others. To give you an idea of the change I noticed in this domain, I never once had to say that “one process does not fit all projects”! This is a given. All I had to do was show how this can be done in a low-cost, collaborative team based environment. Oh and by the way, using IRIS Process Author, the cost of creating VSTS Process Templates is almost zero as we support out-of-the-box generation of these templates ! I had a lot of questions on how these processes, once modeled are consumed. This was a good plug for me to show our second-generation enactment solution.

It seems that the days of a single monolithic dominant methodology are truly over as users realize that these printed tomes or published websites are relegated as shelf-ware by most practioners in real projects. This is where the second generation tooling offered by IRIS Process Live comes into play. We have offered the first generation of this tooling for a few years now, and based on the lessons learned we have made a significant change to this tooling. Offered with an underlying platform such as VSTS, we have sucessfully bridged the gap between the theory around process improvement pattern of author-enact-measure-improve with actual tool based implementations in real projects. This would also deliver on the promise of data-based process improvement initiatives as well as help interested organizations in areas such as project simulations, project forensics and skills and competency improvement initiatives. Watch this blog for more information on this area over the next few months…

Here are some pictures from the conference:

From left to right: Serge (Fujitsu), Eric (Ivar Jacobson), Kamal (Osellus), Juan (Personify Design), Ajoy (Microsoft), Clementino (Microsoft), Chandra (Osellus)

Kamal, Chandra