Pflogging ... in pursuit of accelerated value creation

The word process is an abstract concept. As a result, its meaning is often dependent upon the context in which it is used, and the mental models of those who are using the term. The dangerous part of this is that people can carry on conversations about them, and believe that they are talking about the same situations, even though they are actually discussing several, fundamentally different things. As a result, they each can think that they are communicating about the same 'process', and can go away from that conversation with the mistaken impression that they all agree on something meaningful, or all have a shared vision of what it will take to transform something. What is really going on is that consensus is typically achieved by adding ambiguity, rather than removing it.

As an example of these different 'mindsets', consider the following:  read more »

Processes are as difficult to develop as products, and when considering cultural issues, can be even more difficult.  Unfortunately, developing or improving a process often isn't taken as seriously as a product development effort is... and as a result, the quality of the outputs from such process improvements can have very detrimental impacts on users, who have to try to muddle on, and may find themselves having to build products and fix proceses at the same time.  read more »

COBIT is a governance framework established by the IT Governance Institute which provides good practices for the management of IT processes in a manageable and logical structure. COBIT's four domains (Planning & Organization, Acquisition & Implementation, Delivery & Support, Monitoring) and 34 IT processes provide a US-based equivalent to the more accepted ITIL standards. It's positioning with the Information Systems Audit and Control organization places them in a favored position with respect to Sarbox compliance, and they have published guidance specifically for that purpose. Emphasis is placed on the increasingly important role of IT governance and the emerging application of balanced business scorecards to information technology activities of enterprises.

OPM3 is a maturity model which is aligned with the Project Management Institute's Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), which forms the basis of Project Management certifications world-wide. The OPM3 provides a master listing of relevant organizational project management best practices, a means to self-assess project management maturity within an organization, and a process construct for managing projects at multiple levels. A summary extract of these listings suitable for education and comparison is found here.

The SSE-CMM describes the essential characteristics of an organization's security engineering process that must exist to ensure good security engineering. The model addresses security engineering activities that span the entire trusted product or secure system life cycle, including concept definition, requirements analysis, design, development, integration, installation, operations, maintenance, and decommissioning.

The model is sponsored by the International Systems Security Engineering Association (ISSEA), a non-profit membership organization dedicated to the advancement of Systems Security Engineering as a defined and measurable discipline that was established in 1999 to maintain and support the SSE-CMM.  read more »

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is arguably the most widely accepted approach to IT Service Management, and was developed byh the british government. It is supported by a comprehensive qualification scheme, accredited training organisations, and implementation and assessment tools. The best-practice processes promoted in ITIL both support and are supported by the British Standards Institution’s Standard for IT Service Management (BS15000).

This site includes a browsable, self-assessment questionaire for ITIL that demonstrates both the potential ease of collecting data via polling, and the flexibility of navigation through a subset of the framework elements.

This book provides a framework for capturing and deploying narratives about technical development processes.