Process Your Life

“In god we trust. All others have to bring data.” (W. Edwards Deming)

Starting with measurement is not as easy as it first seems. So you should involve someone with experience. We are very proud that Kobi Vider, one of the world’s most respected professionals regarding advanced statistical approaches and quantitative management, will be acting as our partner. The following article is much inspired from his experience.

Business Goals

Do you know what’s funny about how to measure? Don’t start with the measurements! Start with your business goals. What are the market requirements? What do your customers expect? What does your management require? Uttermost quality? Optimal cost efficiency? Short time to market? Look at your company’s vision statements. Look at the business scorecard. There you will find what your executive management considers to be important for your business. And this in turn will enable to to get senior management attention and involvement.

Information Needs

Break the business goals into information needs. Which kinds of information do you need to find out if you follow your business goals or not. What are the real quality indicators that you need to follow? Defect rates? Or customer satisfaction? Is it neccessary to strictly meet the deadlines? Then focus on milestone trends. Or is it more important to deliver ultimate quality? Then focus on defect rates.

Measure

When you made your information needs clear, then think about measurements. Do not measure what’s easy to measure. Measure what you need to know. Measure output products and measure process performance. Process management tools will help you there. Our Stages process management system contains these kind of measurement features.

Act upon your Measures

Your measurements should be followed by actions. Improve the processes that are out of control or perform out of bounds. If the product quality is not sufficient, analyze why. Missing requirements? Bad design? Poor implementation? And, oh yes, you should have processes before measuring them. Otherwise, you would try to measure chaos.

Added Business Value

Finally, always make clear what’s the added business value of your measurements and the following actions. Let’s say,  you measured too many defects and added peer reviews to your requirement analysis and early design stages. Did the defect rate really drop? How much? What does that mean for your business? In Dollars, Yen or Euro. How much did the customer satisfaction increase? Prove the ROI of your efforts. Your management will ask you about it.

Erich

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Almost everyone in business talks about processes as one of the key factors of success. But understanding what needs to be done to actively manage and optimize your processes is not easy. And there is no silver bullet. As always, it depends on your business and what you like to achieve.

Some people think that optimizing processes means drawing some squares and arrows on a whiteboard. If you are lucky, you find someone who draws these pictures in Visio. And – surprise, surprise – for some very agile kinds of business, this might be the best thing to do. IT driven folks might confront you with things like workflow, web services, SOA, BPM, BPEL, BPMN and the all rest. And – surprise, surprise – for some businesses requiring lots of fully automated (and automatable) IT tasks, this might be the best thing to do.

But these are the two extremes, there must be something in between. From our experience, the optimal process management solution for an organisation depends on three factors:

• business model,
• business goals and
• process maturity

If an organisation neither has a business model nor business goals, its chances to survive are not very high. So, we will concentrate on the third one: process maturity. Models like CMMI or SPICE allow organisations to determine their process maturity. The CMMI model focusses on the organisation’s business goals (contained in so-called “policies”) to find the optimized level of process management. As organisations become more mature, they can adopt more and more aspects of process management. Therefore, a process management solution needs to be scalable to cover and organisation’s requirements from the basic level (process definition) via advanced levels (process control) to experienced levels (process optimisation and predictability).

So, a scalable process management solution should provide features for these different stages, namely

• defining processes
  • modeling processes (simple processes and complex end-to-end processes)
  • managing consistency of processes
  • publishing process descriptions
  • providing role-based access to processes
• managing processes
  • collecting feedback about processes and managing process changes
  • baselining and releasing process descriptions
  • defining best practice processes as organisational standards
  • modifying and enhancing the process metamodel (defining what are the important pieces of a process)
  • assuring compliance to standards like CMMI, SPICE or ISO
• controlling processes
  • performing process tailoring to optimize standard processes for specific projects or tasks
  • enacting processes in real-life projects
    • managing process and project documents with access to document and configuration management tools
    • exporting relevant process parts to BPEL workflow engines, development tools like VSTS or JAZZ/TeamConcert, SOA-capable tools, etc.
  • measuring the process performance
  • measuring the impacts of process improvements
• optimizing processes
  • finding process performance trends over multiple process instantiations
  • optimizing process design (which steps are really neccessary and which steps can be left away)
  • analyzing trends in process performance and managing mitigations when processes are out of control
• predicting processes
  • finding weaknesses or bottlenecks before they impact business
  • simulating the impact of process changes
  • feeding back process performance predictions into planning

Organisations that head off to this “process improvement journey” with sustainable results might take years to get to the final stage. Always start with the end in mind, but really take your time. Go one step after another. It is nonsense to think about any kind of trend analysis when your processes produce chaotic results because no one really knows the processes and just does what he or she thinks is best.

Needless to say, that a process management tool should support you at every stage, helping you to reach the next one when your organisation is prepared for it.

…and this is one reason, why our process management solution is named “Stages”

Erich

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As money is a scarce resource these days,  almost every company focusses on effectiveness and effectivity of all of its actions.  This is not a bad thing. During the boom years, companies spent money on expensive services and tools. The ROI was very often one slide of a ppt presentation shown at the project kick-off meeting. Almost no one did a real analysis, which actions really brought business added value. This is especially true for engineering focussed companies, where business added value is even harder to calculate than in other industries.

Now, times have changed.

This is the main reason, why companies are more and more interested in not buying their tools, but using them as  ”software as a service” (SaaS). You just pay for what you need and when you need it. It’s as simple as that.

Now, what are the key advantages of using process management tools as a service?

Low costs

Instead of buying lots of licenses at one time, you simply order the number of licenses you currently need. If you require more, just order more. If you require less, just change your subscription. And this is only the licenses. Seen from the IT point of view, companies don’t need to care about server installation, rack space, storage space, archive or backup facilities. A development team that needs a solution now and not in three months could use the service without even involving their IT department.

Low risk

Almost every SaaS application has a free trial period. Without any installation, you can start evaluating from the first day. If you don’t like it, just stop. No money wasted. Another important topic is service availability and data security. Companies need to be sure, that they can use the service for their business and that their data is safe and secure.  Every serious SaaS provider guarantees a specific availability and will have backup and restore facilities and periodic security audits.

Quick start

In normal process management projects, the first step is to set up the system, configure it, tweak the process metamodel, model the processes, define the users, create the logins and after all that, have the processes executed in engineering projects and have real business added value out of that. By using SaaS, all the setup effort is much less, the serious process management systems that come as a service are already set up with processes that can be used from day one and just need some process tailoring. Even better, if the system directly supports a guided process tailoring.

Fast ROI

Because of the above factors, ROI can much easier be calculated upfront and measured during the project. This allows to control, if the process management project is really effective and provides added value to the business. Companies may simply cancel the service, if ROI is not in sight.

The Stages process management system is now available as a service. With “Stages as a Service“, customers can start defining, managing and enacting their processes at reasonable costs and with almost no risk. Starting at 15€ or $19 per user and month, the full Stages features (e.g. process modeling, standard compliance assurance, process execution, process-controlled document management) can be used without requiring any local installation.

“Stages as a Service” is best suited for engineering focussed companies or development teams in search of better development and engineering processes. For a jump start, every Stages as a Service instance comes preconfigured with a best practice and proven-in-use development process.

See http://www.stagesAsAService.com/ for more info.

Erich

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On July 9th, the the first customer-internal Stages User Forum took place at Continental. It was organized by Cristina Romcea (thanks a lot!).  In the first track, three different business units presented their current solutions for managing their engineering processes. Both, their process modeling and process enactment was impressive.  All three units headed for Automotive SPICE level 3 and continuously prove that by a large number of assessments.

In the second track, the corporate process architecture was presented. The discussions showed, that it is not easy to bridge the gap between an abstract product lifecycle process and engineering processes that can directly be used in development projects. The key idea is to model processes in different abstraction layers and map the interfacing components onto each other. With its unique compliance mapping features, Stages should be ready for doing that.

Tool integration is key in all process management projects. Therefore, solutions for integrating process and project management (Stages interfaces seamlessly with MS Project Enterprise Server), process and document management (Stages interface to MS Sharepoint) and metrics collection across the toolchain (Stages Reporting Engine) were presented in the third track.

At the end all participants agreed, that the User Forum was a very good platform for presenting and sharing ideas around all topics of process management. The User Forum will definitely be repeated next year.

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Stages is now twittering: http://twitter.com/StagesProcess

Get earliest possible info on the Stages development and engineering process management in general.

Erich

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Our solution for integrated project and process management, the integration between Stages and ACTANO RPlan, will be released with Stages 5.1 and RPlan 9.3. The following video shows how it works. The video is a pre-release, a version with an audio track will appear on our website soon.

Stages manages CMMI/SPICE/ISO/YourFavoriteQualityModel-compliant processes and RPlan allows enterprise-level management of projects by using these processes. We’re very proud on the seamless integration. Please tell me if you like it. And if you don’t like it, I’d like to know that too.

Erich

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Kasse Initiatives CEO and Principal Consultant Tim Kasse (right) and Method Park CTO and Stages Architect Erich Meier (left) are combing their experience to significantly enhance Method Park's "Stages for CMMI" capability

The Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) Conference in San Jose is now a while back, so it is time for a little summary. The SEPG always has been the most important CMMI event. In these economic times, 900 participants are a pretty good number. As a result, the people that were there were very focussed and not “just looking around”. We had some very interesting talks and were able to make a number of exciting new contacts, especially because we launched our new process management system “Stages for CMMI“.

My personal highlight of the conference was  Tim Kasse. This guy really knows what is important about CMMI, systems engineering and process improvement in general. His tutorial was a blast! The SEI featured him on the conference newsletter and they knew why. We feel honored to cooperate with him. He helped us to improve “Stages for CMMI” a lot and he promised to do so in the future.

My favorite Tim Kasse quote, directly taken from a customer talk, is “I am not a tools guy. In fact, sometimes I really hate tools. But Stages is something that you should get, because it really helps”.

Our main topics were the introduction of “CMMI for Services” due to the large number of companies offering services today and “CMMI for Acquisition” for those companies seeking to find and manage suitable partners who offer critical services. These additional CMMI constellations now officially released by the SEI will greatly expand the customer base for CMMI beyond development and the upcoming interest in multimodel approaches. With more and more standards to be followed, the Stages multimodel compliance features are key to deal with the different CMMIs, ISO, Safety Standards and development models in parallel. Stages’ ability to break these standards into pieces and transform them into real world processes to be followed in day to day work boosts the process acceptance, brings fast ROI and helps people in their daily life. Because in the end, it’s all about people, not processes.

…and YES, it was not easy leaving California and going back to rainy and cold Germany again

Erich

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Method Park will present the next step towards integration of process management and project planning on the Actano User Conference on Thursday 26th of March.

The second preview of the integration of both tools enables you to transfer your tailored processes to RPlan. It only takes you two clicks and you can start planning your project based on the organizations processes! The import of the Stages data to RPlan is conducted via Web-Service. The Stages process information containing phases, activities, role-responsibilities and work products is used as template for process compliant project planning in RPlan. The preview already contains a separation into top level milestone-planning and dependend detailed plans for e.g. development phases.

Visit our booth at the Actano User Conference to watch a live-demo.

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“Stages for CMMI”, the newest pre-customized Stages version will be officially released on SEPG in San Jose, CA.

In addition to the usual release information, that you can find here, there are a few things that might interest you. “Stages for CMMI” comes with all three CMMI models that are currently available: CMMI for Development (CMMI-DEV), CMMI for Services (CMMI-SVC) and CMMI for Acquisition (CMMI-ACQ). All three come with their latest releases. With that, you can model your processes and make sure that they are compliant to any of these models.

The interesting part is, you can use the best of these models in parallel. Organizations that have both development and services (and that’s almost every organisation on the planet) are able to choose the parts of the models that they like to concentrate on and check their processes against them. So even if you do not plan to implement everything that CMMI is telling you (and that’s A LOT), you can select those parts of the model that support your business goals.

This has some important implications on the way you describe and publish your processes. You simply give your users the information they need for their daily work (e.g., templates for work products, methodology information, direct access to project documents) instead of overwhelming them with CMMI model theory and terminology. Thus, your people don’t find themselves in a completely different world. It helps them understanding the basics and, in turn, boosts your process acceptance.

Seen from the technical side, “Stages for CMMI” is a full feature release. It contains all functional features that are available in normal Stages versions.

If you have further questions, feel free to ask.

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With Stages is possible to perform multi project metric calculations.
Assume that you have a couple of projects and you want to see a Milestone Trend Analysis.  You can on the one hand look to each individual Report. On the other hand you can select a lowerlevel project node and call a multi proejct report. Here you can see a Milestone Trend Analysis of all projects.

Just take a look to the video….

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