An early version of MOF Mobile Reference is available at the Apple App Store now. I am already deep into the development of the next version, which will contain much more content, and it should be ready in a couple of weeks.

While sifting through various Microsoft Operations Framework documents, I came across an interesting definition of process in a document called Using MOF for ISO/IEC 20000: A MOF Companion Guide.

A process is a set of interrelated activities designed to transform inputs into pre-defined acceptable outputs. The benefit of a process-based framework is that you then have a repeatable set of activities in place designed to take the input, modify or change that input, and deliver the desired output. Because the process is documented and repeatable, it is now a tangible item that can be monitored, measured, and improved over time. If you do not like the outcome, you can either change the inputs, change the process activities to improve the output, or change the expectation of what the output is to be. By defining and communicating the expected output, you also control the customer’s expectation (and therefore the customer’s satisfaction).

What I like best about this definition is how it relates the concept of process all the way to the benefits for the end customer. The definition also builds on the tangible nature of defined processes which makes process monitoring, measurement, and improvement possible.

Keep in mind that both MOF and ISO-20000 are process based.

Over the last few days, I have been working on a mobile reference app of the Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF), which I submitted to the Apple App Store this morning. I will let you know once it’s approved and ready for download.

I always wanted to dig deeper into MOF, partly because I had noticed many of our larger customers increasingly utilize it in their mission critical operations. Developing this app has provided the opportunity to do so. I find that developing an application forces you to understand the underlying details of subject.

In developing the first version of this app, I gained a thorough understanding of MOF’s meta-model. I am very impressed with MOF’s vast amount of practical content, and am already thinking about designing the next version of the app with much more content.

My overarching goal in developing these mobile references is to represent the already codified body of knowledge in a form more conducive to internalization. My belief is that the Mobile Internet Platform is ideally suited for effective internalization of codified knowledge.

This is a work in progress but I feel it will mature rapidly.

Version 1.1 of the CMMI Mobile Reference is available at the Apple App Store now.

I have just submitted an update of the CMMI Mobile Reference app to the App Store.  I have fixed all the reported bugs in this minor update. I greatly appreciate all the comments, feedback, and reported errors.

I will let you know when it becomes available for download.

A few days ago, I had a very interesting conversation with a process improvement expert. He is part of a large multi-national company and for the last 18 months, he has been responsible for the deployment of process improvement best practices throughout his company’s IT department. This work has given him valuable insight on the subject of process improvement deployment, and I very much appreciate him sharing his experience and lessons learned with me. In this post, I will present the process improvement deployment experiences of this customer as a case study, with their lessons learned summarized at the end. This case study illustrates how theoretical concepts of process improvement can be put into practice.

For organizations embarking on the path of achieving a process improvement mindset, the first logical step is to capture their existing processes in a safe, usable, and accessible form. Safe meaning that the processes have the appropriate level of protection from misplacement and loss. Usable meaning that the processes are in a format (or formats) that can be easily used by all members of the organization. Accessible meaning that the processes are accessible organization-wide from a single well-known portal. Once the organization’s internal processes are captured in this manner, a gap analysis can be conducted and the indentified gaps filled by the industry’s best practices. This is a laborious step and requires careful planning and project management, but process authoring and management tools can substantially reduce this effort.

For this customer, the first step involved capturing a large number of processes, many of which were never previously documented. Their strategy relied heavily on tasking various subject matter experts (SMEs), from different IT groups, with process definition. The SMEs were provided with an intuitive tool and training. The SMEs, working from their own various geographic locations, were then able to enter their group’s processes in the central system. The process group constantly reviewed the entered processes and provided feedback to the SMEs. Once the initial processes were captured, the process group structured them into a reusable process architecture. SMEs, in turn, were able to review the process architecture and provide feedback. Employing this strategy, the customer was able to distribute the process definition effort across its IT department, and created a comprehensive process architecture in a matter of months. Moreover, this strategy made the process improvement adoption (institutionalization) more likely, as the user community was intimately involved from the beginning—versus being dictated to by an external group. It creates a sense of ownership.

At the end of this step, the organization had codified its distributed tacit knowledge.

To further increase process adoption by the organization project teams, the process group, with the help of SMEs, created variations of each process to better suit the various project categories. All the processes (and their variations) were made available for consumption from an organization-wide process portal. The portal also provided sophisticated “search and select” functionality to make sure the most suitable process could be quickly identified for a given project. Process search and selection will form the basis of a comprehensive process tailoring solution in the future.

The customer decided on this approach as opposed to burdening the project managers with the tailoring task. They felt tailoring processes by adjusting them was too complex a task for the project managers at this stage.

Based on my experience, many organizations underestimate the complexities of process tailoring. I feel this simplified tailoring approach is sufficient for most organizations, with the exception of matured process-centric ones.

To effectively improve the processes and the process architecture, the organization relied heavily on input from the end users. The “feedback” and “community” functionality of the process portal was used to collect and capture feedback and lessons learned from the organization’s project teams which, in turn, were used by the process group and the SMEs for ongoing process improvement.

Keep in mind that a single integrated system provided the process capturing, definition, architecture, tailoring, and feedback, with end-to-end traceability.

As the next step, the customer is developing usage models to accurately measure the rate of process adoption by the organization’s project teams. They feel having reliable adoption metrics is critical to sustaining  the support of senior management.

In summary, the following are the lessons learned from this process improvement effort:

• Identify and utilize SMEs for capturing the organization’s processes
• Importance of training SMEs and providing an easy-to-use tool for process definition
• Importance of a process architecture that supports reusability
• Create a sense of ownership as early as possible
• Simplify the task of tailoring
• Minimize the effort required by project managers to use a process in the their project
• Base the ongoing process improvement on user feedback
• Importance of end-to-end traceability
• Importance of usage models in winning and sustaining senior management support

This case study illustrates how theoretical concepts of process improvement can be put into practice.

I feel topics such as usage models and institutionalization/internalization deserve more detailed exploration.

Process improvement encompasses process definition, as processes have to be defined and manageable before they can be improved.

This is evident in the following CMMI practices:

• OPF 1.1 Establish Organizational Process Needs
• OPF 1.2 Appraise the Orgnization’s Processes
• OPD 1.1 Establish Standard Processes
• OPD 1.2 Establish Lifecycle Model Description
• OPD 1.5 Establish the Organization’s Process Asset Library

In an earlier post, I referred  to the Work Item Tracking iPhone app we are currently working on. The development of this app was motivated by our heavy reliance on Team Foundation Server’s (TFS) Work Item Tracking for internal projects. Using a web browser, our project teams (in Toronto and Bangkok) and customers have a real-time detailed view of  their projects. We felt having the same level of project visibility  via a mobile device would be very useful.

We wanted the Work Item Tracking app to work with any TFS without requiring installation of additional server module. Consequently, the app has to rely on web services to communicate with TFS server. This isn’t as simple as you may think. Microsoft considers work item tracking web services as too complex for third part development, and doesn’t publish the APIs.  Instead Microsoft provides a client component, which wraps the web services, and provides a .Net Object Model API. Fortunately, our team has been able to discover the required work item web services APIs.

Currently I am working on the module that gets a list of projects and work item types for each project from a TFS. I will include screen captures of this module in a future post.

The App Store approval of CMMI Mobile Reference took 14 days. I was expecting the same duration for COBIT Mobile Reference app approval, but was  pleasantly surprised to get the approval in 8 days. So now the COBIT Mobile Reference is available for download from the App Store, free of charge.

I spent a weekend developing this app; it’s a basic reference for COBIT 4.1 processes and control objectives. Although it has limited functionality, I find it very useful and hope others will also benefit from it.

I have been working hard–with the help of our VSTS guru David Gowan–on a more functional iPhone app that tracks VSTS work items. I will discuss this app in a future post.

I am also planning other much more sophisticated role-based situational process improvement apps. At this point, I am still struggling with the appropriate representation of an end-to-end process on mobile devices. For the content of these apps, I am considering MOF, EPF, and a version of SCRUM, and am open to suggestions.

My overarching goal is to make the internalization of codified process improvement bodies of knowledge easier for practitioners.

On a separate note, I am amazed, given the iPhone tool set and developers’ support and using the right process, how rapidly iPhone apps can be developed.

The Yardistry Design Tool that I mentioned in my previous post is out! As I mentioned in that post, it’s been implemented using Flex 3 and Papervision3D and stands out where applications that leverage 3D in the browser go, especially in terms of the complex tooling it brings into the browser.

Here’s the direct link to the tool: http://designer.yardistrystructures.com/.  Select the ‘Custom Design Tool’ and get started modeling your outdoor structures.

A slightly technical aside: All the 3D part shapes that you see in the tool were created in popular 3D applications like Google Sketchup and 3DS Max and imported into our tool using our custom import utility so that we could apply rules to the shapes so as to work in the tool. Yardistry had these parts designed and available in the Sketchup format and we brought them in without them having to do anything special to make these shapes usable in the design tool.

Jane was the primary analyst on the Yardistry project and I was the primary architect/designer for the design tool and we are both based out of Toronto. Our development team is based out of Bangkok and they recently celebrated the completion of the Yardistry project and sent us a pic. They did such an amazing job – mad skills!!

This also makes me think about how we have got our development processes locked down. We were very agile with very quick short cycle times. At the same time, we were able to communicate and track requirements, design and development milestones for this fairly complex application between Toronto and Bangkok seamlessly and without compromise.  As with almost all of our projects, we used Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) for  managing and tracking development and bug tracking. It helps that we have a lot of VSTS and process expertise in-house so that we were able to leverage VSTS to the full extent possible.

We have an excellent team to begin with but we are able to leverage tooling such as VSTS to make a distributed team a non-issue – and in fact make it an advantage.

Congratulations to the team!