Let's consider the implications of distributing attention across too many competing demands. Inefficiencies exist as people or teams switch from performing one task to another. Let's call the monitoring and control function which performs such context switches our 'Work Operating System'. This Work Operating System is offered to provide a metaphor for what occurs during context switches, and relate that to the actions which an operating system must perform as it manages the resources on a computer. In each case, whether the computer or person switches contexts, there is overhead (in both time and energy) that is involved in making such transitions. Read more »

DO-178 is the primary document used by aviation certification authorities throughout the world. The document is used to assess the adequacy of practices used in developing software for commercial aircraft. Certification is a complex topic, described in the latest version of DO-178 as follows:

Legal recognition by the certification authority that a product, service, organization or person complies with the requirements. Such certification comprises the activity of technically checking the product, service, organization or person and the formal recognition of compliance with the applicable requirements by issue of a certificate, license, approval or other documents as required by national laws and procedures. In particular, certification of a product involves: (a) the process of assessing the design of a product to ensure that it complies with a set of standards applicable to that type of product so as to demonstrate an acceptable level of safety; (b) the process of assessing an individual product to ensure that it conforms with the certified type design; (c) the issuance of a certificate required by national laws to declare that compliance or conformity has been found with standards in accordance with items (a) or (b) above. Read more »

Organizations often pursue competency-based management techniques in efforts to understand and secure a competitive advantage within the markets which they serve. The competency assessments which are initiated by such organizations will only be useful if the structure, definition and effective application of the underlying elements of these competency assessments are sufficiently robust across an industry.

A guiding principle for such organizations is suggested by the Software Engineering Institute's value proposition for the CMMI:

The quality of a product is largely determined by the capability of the process which is designed to produce it, and the maturity of the organization in implementing that process.

A timeline is a retrospective representation of a linear sequence of significant events which have occurred during the accomplishment of some activity. A timetable provides a corresponding, forward-looking series for pre-arranged events, and is often organized as a tabular list. Such timetables are 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 »