Standards and best practices

Timelines

Bryan Pflug — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 14:17:45 -0600

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 »

Processes, Mental Models, and Improvement Dynamics

Bryan Pflug — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 08:12:24 -0500

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 »

Playbooks and fishing lessons, instead of more laws and sermons

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 10:18:59 -0600

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 »

Becoming competent in managing competency

Bryan Pflug — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 11:08:51 -0600

So what is a way forward, if we are to adopt a competency-based management practice?

Refer to improvement strategies on this site for sources of material.

Pursuing a meaningful definition of competency

Bryan Pflug — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 10:43:25 -0600

No meaningful progress can be made in the effective use of any competency concept without a clear definition of what it means to be competent, and how to separate the wheat from the chaff. read more »

Ten questions to discern the real value of processes in a business

Bryan Pflug — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:58:56 -0500

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: read more »

Consistently improving process performance

Bryan Pflug — Sat, 12 May 2007 10:04:23 -0500

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.
read more »

Survival is only an option

Bryan Pflug — Wed, 02 May 2007 05:53:17 -0500

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 »

How are best practices best implemented?

Bryan Pflug — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 18:48:40 -0500

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: read more »

Protocols are better than processes

Bryan Pflug — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 08:06:42 -0500

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. read more »