I would describe a process management lifecycle as generally consisting of three broad phases. In the first phase a robust process architecture facilitates the tailoring and blending of various methodologies to come up with a process that is suitable for specific domain, category of projects or even a specific upcoming project. Methodology experts, subject matter experts, process engineers and project managers are the typical kind of roles that would contribute in this phase.

In the next phase, these processes are shared with a wider audience. This is essential to get feedback and increase process ownership within the project team that would have to ultimately enact it. A process portal would ensure that the processes tailored in the earlier phase are versioned, categorized and available for review. It is important that there is no overhead associated to consume these processes. You should make it convenient for a team of practioners (who may not be process experts) to locate, review and comment on the process they are interested in. The process portal would also be the single location from where users can download VSTS process templates, MS project templates, published online process and printable (document format) process. To encourage a transparent vibrant process community, tools like blogs, ratings, newsgroups should be used extensively.

Finally, in the third phase, the processes are now enacted in real projects. With the advent of ALM middleware like VSTS, this next generation process enactment takes the form where process can now be instrumented within the tools used during the project. This not only ensures a friction free process enactment but also ensures data-based decisions on process enhancements as well as compliancy auditing.

Those of you who are aware of the work done by Osellus in the past already know that we have tooling & services to support the first and last phases described above. IRIS Process Author and IRIS Process Live facilitate process authoring & architecture and process enactment respectively. Now we are getting ready to announce the work we are completing in supporting the process portal layer support. In fact within the next few days we will announce a process portal within Osellus.com that would provide the support for a community interested in process templates for publicly available and open source methodologies. Stay tuned.

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 Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 10:39 am and is filed under General. 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.