It is day 3 at the SEPG North America 2010 conference and another eventful day at the Savannah Convention Center. Osellus is here to exhibit our flagship product IRIS Process Author, a web-based process solution that enables organizations to document, tailor, publish and enact their processes.

Over the last two days we have met and talked with a lot of attendees including process improvement leads, friends of our customers, speakers, CMMI consultants and appraisers, and first timers to the conference. Whether they are here to learn, to offer services or to find solutions, everyone I have talked to shares a common sentiment – they are always looking for tools that could make their lives easier!

For instance, many of the organizations developing and improving their processes are still documenting processes the old fashioned way – in Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Visio diagrams. In order to share these processes with the developers, appraisers and customers, home grown tools or SharePoint portals are commonly used to store documentations and process metrics in a central location. However, there is no easy way to filter element associations defined in a process (such as activities by roles), which makes it difficult for end users to consume large amount of information contained within the process in order to gain a clear understanding of what is required of them.

Furthermore, modifications and maintanence of these process assets are very cumbersome and require a lot of manual effort to ensure consistency. Process measurement requirements often evolve faster than the home grown tools that generate process reports to support assessment needs and evaluations.

With IRIS Process Author, process developers can

• define every process element in standardized format
• extend process element definition by adding custom attributes without vendor reconfiguration of the tool
• click-and-drop process elements to create your own process flowcharts and diagrams
• map process elements to multiple reference models (e.g., CMMI, ISO, or any proprietary procedures and standards) for compliancy
• publish processes in a consistent format and share them with all levels of users outside of the tool (no licenses required)
• view process information from multiple perspectives - by process diagram, Roles, Work Products, Disciplines and reference models
• Collaborate on process development, collect feedback and suggest improvements in a centralized process portal

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference. It has been a great experience to learn from industry leaders and fellow participants on processes improvements and desired tooling support. I look forward to meeting many more at our booth and after the conference.

There have been quite a few development posts in our blog as of late, so I thought I’d share some current activities from our products and services front.

In the past month, we welcomed three new customers to our IRIS Product Suite and Content Bridge for VSTS, including a large Canadian Federal government agency. Two of the customers were specifically looking for a solution to bring RUP or RUP-inspired methodology into VSTS for process enactment. After evaluating their requirements, we selected the right tool from our product family and provided our expertise in this area to deliver the needed solutions for them.

As VSTS continues to gain maturity as an ALM tool, we have noticed growing interest in processes and process integration within the development environment to facilitate its enactment. Organizations who have adopted TFS initially for centralized source control and automated build capabilities are now ready for more. After having deployed and migrated existing projects to VSTS, many are looking into bringing their own processes into the tool to benefit from process guidance and work item tracking in their daily development activities.

However, creating process templates for proprietary processes remains a challenge. In this regard, it is a pity that a process tool, such as RMC, does not provide cross-platform support to generate process templates that can be used in a (competitor) enactment platform.

I believe that a well-rounded process tool should not only satisfy the modeling needs of process authors, but also provide the necessary support to help project teams deploy and implement processes in a chosen enactment tool, whichever it may be.

For those who are interested in seeing an RUP process template live in action in VSTS, here is a recording of a webinar that we hosted with Microsoft last year. In this webinar, I used an RUP Process Template for Small Projects as an example to create a project in VSTS.