Pflogging ... in pursuit of accelerated value creation

A timeline is a a graphical representation of a linear sequence of significant events which has occurred during the accomplishment of some activity. A timetable provides a corresponding, forward-looking series of pre-arranged events, organized as a tabular list, and is used to plan and track such activities for performing and reporting on future work. Each of the events associated with these timelines and timetables may be comprised of either top-level milestones or more detailed inchstones.  read more »

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 »

There is often quite a bit of attention given to process management in an endeavor, but this does not mean that this focus is actually producing meaningful results. How could one tell whether processes were playing a key role in an organization or not? Or is it more like a speed limit on a roadway - rules are acknowledged when in front of the courts and police, but only used as general guidance otherwise?

In the spirit of managing by facts and data, here are some questions that could support a review of evidence that could allow such a determination to be made:

One of the criticisms I've heard about CMMI from Ivar Jacobson is that just because you have a highly mature (e.g. level 5) process doesn't mean it's better than someone else's level 2 process. Of course, this begs the question of what constitutes 'better' - for a particular business purpose, what's right for one business model and scenario might be completely wrong for another. So in general, I think Ivar's right - the CMMI is a model for maturing a capabitility for continuous improvement, but you could be level 5 shop and produce a very low quantity of high quality code per period of time, when your business situation really needed a high-output, 'good-enough' approach that agile methods are so popular for producing.
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Steve McConnell has written this book on project management for leads and managers. There isn't really much that's software-specific here, but as usual, Steve presents an organized and convincing approach for using a disciplined engineering process for product development, and backs up his recommendations with convincing facts and data. The material is presented effectively by starting with various stakeholder's perspectives - the team member, the customer, and the manager - and introducing the notion of a 'survival checklist' to determine how prepared the project is for the hazards which it likely will encounter. From that 'self-assessment', specific guidance is then offered ('survival skills') in the following areas:

Planning

• Hitting a moving target
• Requirements Development
• Quality Assurance
• Architecture

Phased Development  read more »

Software Project Survival Guide (Pro -- Best Practices) author: Steve McConnell rating: asin: 1572316217 binding: Paperback list price: $24.99 USD amazon price: $16.49 USD

In A proven pattern of successful change interventions, a series of steps are identified which have been proven to work across many different types of change efforts within organizations. Rather than operate exclusively within a particular improvement framework, these same steps can also be applied across frameworks. The idea behind this approach is to truly search for the 'best' practices in an open marketplace of ideas, and integrate those ideas into a unified framework for assessment of existing practices.

Functionality provided on this site supports this idea, in a very limited, but functional 'prototype' sense, by:

Over the last 20 years, here has been an enormous investment in developing and improving processses in many different business through Business Process Reengineering. Much of this work did not accomplish much other than to write down what people already were doing and knew how to do. Additionally, these writings were documented at such a high level that they did not specify anything about what behavioral changes people were actually expected to begin to make, how they were expected to make those changes, and when it would actually matter to someone. As a result, they unfortunately provided a false sense of security to management that things would actually improve based upon these process investments, without providing the necessary underpinings for such improvements to actually occur.