Let me invite you to the Brewery!

Working on the principle that even I could organize an event in a brewery, we've decided the launch party for xProcess 2 should be at the old Whitbread Brewery in the City of London (see www.thebrewery.co.uk for more details of the venue). It's an historic old building and, in the hope that there could be something good stored down there, we're meeting in the Smeeton Vaults.

If you're in striking distance of the City I very much hope you'll join us for the event. Here are the details:

Date: Monday 24th April
Registration and coffee: 3pm
Programme: 3.30pm – 5pm followed by drinks reception and exhibition
Venue: The Brewery , Chiswell Street, London EC1Y 4SD
Underground: 3 minutes walk from Moorgate or Barbican; 10 minutes walk from Liverpool Street or Bank.

Come and hear about ground-breaking developments in xProcess for capturing and improving the processes behind your projects, and then supporting your whole team in estimating, planning, resourcing, scheduling and monitoring the live projects. Simple to install, xProcess gives the team access to all project artifacts and the latest process and scheduling data. Information from the team and other stakeholders concerning estimates, availability, priorities and risk is available to all other stakeholders, and every change is versioned and auditable. Find out how xProcess can empower your teams and increase agility, best practice conformance, visibility of plans and progress, auditability and quality.

Register for the event now at www.ivis.com/london-launch or call Laura on 023 8087 5899.

Versioning and control

It is worth noting that behind the xProcess workbenches used by the managers, process engineers, planners and participants on the teams there is an innovative distributed architecture that ensures all the changes made are shared throughout the team. Whether changes were made originally when the team member was connected to the network or temporarily working off-line, xProcess handles storing and merging changes as they arrive at the server and each distributed client. I'm beginning to wonder whether this particular aspect of xProcess is in fact the most important from the point of view of effective team management, even though it is probably the least conspicuous of its virtues.

Since documents and other artifacts can be included for management within the xProcess environment, the underlying architectureallows all project data to be safely managed and distributed with minimum intrusion for team members who simply experience that processes, plans and artifacts they are using are kept continuously in-step with the rest of the team. Subsequent auditing of the project, should it be required is very straightforward since there is full access to complete change histories of project files. It is a vital but inconspicuous benefit of the xProcess system.

If you'd like to know more about this particular aspect of xProcess, I'm sharing a platform with Paul Kuzan, Ivis's chief architect for xProcess, at JavaOne in May. We'll be sharing more about this aspect and lessons learned from the implementation of the system.