During the last few months, I have spent most of my time on mobile process improvement tools. Working on these apps has had the side benefit of giving me a more in depth knowledge of exciting process improvement bodies of knowledge and even more appreciation for their scope.  Bodies of work such as these codify a vast amount of practical knowledge and best practices from which any size organization or team–formal or agile–can greatly benefit.  I feel the persistent bottleneck stalling wide utilization of these bodies of knowledge is due to the difficulty of internalization.  I strongly believe that having the right tools is the remedy for this internalization problem.

The majority of these tools will be imbedded in or made accessible via the user’s exciting systems such as ALM platforms, but a subset of them will run on mobile Internet platforms such as iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry. The ubiquity and instant accessibility nature of these devices make them specially practical in situational usage. You are not always at your desktop when you need process improvement related assistance.

We at Osellus have been working on ALM based process improvement tools for over eight years, and more recently we have started working on mobile process improvement related tooling.

Many times while thinking about or discussing CMMI related topics, I have difficulty recalling a particular process area, goal, or practice. I don’t always have a CMMI book or my laptop handy, but I always carry my iPhone. This got me thinking about developing a CMMI reference for iPhone that I could access at anytime.

I feel this app is useful for any iPhone owner who is into CMMI and process improvement. You can get a free copy of this application from the Apple App Store.

I had so much fun with this application that I am thinking about creating other process improvement, governance, or development methodology related apps.

I hope the process improvement community finds this app useful.

This is the first post in a series detailing out a process we at Osellus have devised for development of iPhone applications. This process incorporates Apple’s best practices for iPhone development, as well as, the many relevant lessons learned from the general software development body of knowledge.

This work was initiated by our iPhone development and project management teams. As we embarked on various customer projects, the project management office wanted to have better project visibility and the ability to make sure the projects met the customers’ objectives. It  has also helped project managers with staffing of each project with the right skill set. We intend to improve this process based on lessons learned from the completed projects.

In the next post of the series, I will cover the overall business objectives, and the process objectives as they relate to each business objective which thereby form the basis of the process.