Process Management & Process Fusion

Since the late 1990’s, there has been a certain level of obsessive focus on process management as a cure to the ills of program management. The basic premise is that any process paradigm is better than none at all. A variety of organizations including the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) and International Standards Organization (ISO) have produced massive quantities of literature on the subject along with a variety of process management guidelines design to help PMOs develop new processes or improve existing ones.

One of the more notable examples of this is CMMi. In the federal government, CMMi certification is often used as a criterion for awarding IT contracts (i.e. a contract must demonstrate that they have achieved a certain CMMi level of competence through a formal accredited certification). The problem that many have found when relying on process management and / or such certifications is that they are not accurate indicators of the organizations performance in specific project scenarios. So, while the fact that an organization does have some repeatable or mature processes it doesn’t necessarily prepare them to solve problems any better than before. This may sound counterintuitive but it is has been proven by a rather larger backlash in the software industry where complex process paradigms are now being replaced by new ‘Agile’ methodologies.

The most basic premise of the Agile movement is that trying to over-regulate processes subverts the core goals of innovative and rapid development, thus the process becomes a bureaucracy or ideology more than a facilitation medium. PLM views process management as it views all other elements of PMO business – all are aspects within a larger whole and cannot be easily separated from one another without losing the relationships and contexts necessary to make the larger organism work. Product Lifecycle Management is becoming especially dependent upon the successful implementation of Agile processes, given the ever-decreasing sales and product development lifecycles.

Process Fusion
Process Fusion is a realization that processes do not occur in exclusion to one another - all of the processes inherent within a typical PMO serve the same overall set of goals & objectives...

Copyright 2008, Semantech Inc.