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.

Last 5 posts by Kamal Ahluwalia

• Is my process true to my methodology of choice? - January 7th, 2008
• EPF – Failing grade on collaboration - January 2nd, 2008
• Governance Webinar Recording - December 7th, 2007
• Webinar - Effective Software Development Governance - November 28th, 2007
• IRIS Process Central is here... - November 19th, 2007

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under Processes & Methodologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.