'Killing development projects early and often...'

Esther Schindler's recent post what Gartner is telling your boss makes for interesting reading.

Gartner urges managers to consider better process control and governance, managing 'application portfolios' much as they do stock portfolios. Part of this discipline is 'killing development projects early and often'. While no doubt some managers will want to respond to this by applying for the "Ghegis Khan training course for mangers" what it really means is that managers need much better information than many currently have about the status and delivered benefits of their projects.

Now where might they begin to get that kind of information from? Not only does it need to be part of the process of managing a portfoio of projects, the information needs to immediately accessible through the process support environment.

Exactly.

Who needs what?

One of the key ideas in xProcess is that it puts planning and process control in everyone’s hands - at the level they need it. For example...

Project Participants can:

• see their tasks and priorities (potentially across multiple projects)
• update estimates and progress
• update their availability and overhead activities
• update their active tasks and close their tasks when complete
• see changes to priorities and target dates

Project Managers and Planners can:

• create project tasks and prioritize them
• change available resources for the project and assign them to roles or tasks
• set the scope and target dates for timeboxes and releases
• see immediately if tasks are forecast to miss targets and why
• view burndown or Gantt charts of the whole project or timeboxes
• select and/or customize the processes their projects use

Project Executives and Stakeholders can:

• overview the goals and progress of multiple projects
• monitor and improve the processes adopted by projects
• compare and contrast processes if they are different
• examine “what-if” scenarios by varying resource deployment
• redeploy resources between projects
• monitor financials spend and earned value of projects
• generate different format reports for projects and resources.

Process Improvement Managers can:

• monitor and compare the progress of projects applying different processes
• capture process improvement strategies from different projects
• define and improve company standard processes
• monitor process and quality compliance.

The new UI in version 2.5 will reflect the different emphasis required by different roles with tailored perspectives for Project Managers, Project Participants and Process Definers. Expect this to be developed further in future releases.

Summer Fruit

Mmm - no postings in June July and August! Blogging just doesn't seem to have been on the agenda this summer. So what has been happening?

Actually a lot, and the benefits of all that work is now close to fruition. xProcess 2.5 is released in October and has a plethora of new features and user improvements that really are exciting. The headlines for the release mention Workflow, Graphical Process Modelling, Financials and Web Client. But in fact there is so much more, and I'm sure our current users will be delighted while new users will be surprised by the richness of functionality that's available through a much sparser user interface.

Even before the release I've been hitting the road again and showing selected customers the new direction and it's encouraging to hear the feedback. There's a lot to live up to. One customer gave us an outstanding accolade from his use of the existing version:

xProcess has freed me from fighting with a tool to make a plan, and instead given me direct visibility of our progress against plan, allowing me to get on with my job of project managing. (John Andrews, iiPay, www.iipay.com)

Thanks John. That's very much what we've set out to do. I think you'll find this new version takes you further down that road.

A lot of new stuff in version 2.5 is focused on enabling our OEM partners and larger customers to build more integrated process improvement and project planning environments. Workflow let's notification flow round the company, as well as receiving and issuing updates to other tools in the environment like issue trackers, requirements repositories and test tools. The Financials package allows integration with accounting tools and the Web server and client means that pages can built that show xProcess data and allow it to be updated by authorized users. Expect to see some exciting developments in this department over the coming months.

Overall it's been a fruitful summer... even if the harvest is yet to come!

Share your Personal-Edition plans NOW!

It's great how many people are discovering the free Personal Edition of xProcess. I get to see the download figures occasionallly and it's very heartening to know so many of you are getting this version and putting in your own plans and processes.

Of course there is a snag with the Personal Edition - it's personal!

This means there's only one of you who can see it and that means you're missing out on the best aspects of xProcess - its support for collaborative processes and team planning. This month the development of Ivis' partnerships with CollabNet and Clearvision means we now have a very simple way to upgrade you to an evaluation version of the Enterprise Edition. Straightaway you'll be able to share your plans and interact with them as a team. Just go to www.ivis.com/evaluation if you'd like to try it out.

"Plan of Intent" and "Plan of Record"

Ron Lichty is well known in the Software Engineering community on the West Coast as a practitioner, as a seasoned project manager of many successful ventures and in a number of SIGs and conferences in which he is active. In spite of knowing Ron by correspondence over a long period of time it was only at JavaOne this year that we finally got together and I'm very glad we did.

Ron wrote to me after our meeting:

I told a number of people later at JavaOne, and even later that evening at the Software Engineering Management SIG, about xProcess. It really looks good. A question came up: It's a common technique in large organizations to keep a "Plan of Intent" and a "Plan of Record" - to have two project plans, one for the business partners and boss, one you actually execute to. Any support for that in xProcess?

Good question! Here's my reply...

There is support in xProcess for an arbitrary number of target levels through what we call (in the process definitions) Planning Boundaries (PBs). The patterns containing PBs can be called what you like in the process definition - typically timeboxes, milestones, releases, "sprints", commitments, etc. PBs consist of a "scope" (a set of tasks) and a target date. So your "plan of record" could be contained in a set of PBs showing your commitments to one or more parties and the status of the PBs would be different from the team target status even though it is derived from the same project forecasts. It's a useful technique and one we recommend to xProcess users.

By the way Ron has just completed a cross-country ski marathon in Anchorage, Alaska benefiting the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. If you enjoy photos, maps, and stories of such adventures, see this site http://www.active.com/donate/tntgsf/RonLichty. Also check out Ron's blog at http://ronlichty.blogspot.com.

Interview with Artima: Planners and "Do-ers" (AUDIO)

JavaOne is all about meeting people and finding the connections between what they are doing and your own work. This was brought home to me when I spent some time talking to Frank Sommers and Bill Venners, who are editors of the Artima Developer site, while they were recording interviews with vendors of innovative technology at JavaOne. You can hear their interview with me by clicking on this link... Audio file.

Many of the developers that I met at the show immediately denied they had anything to do with project management, which they associated with people who drew charts and manipulated budgets but rarely interacted effectively with the teams they were working in. It was very clear that the kind of synchronized connection between planners and "do-ers" that xProcess supports finds a strong resonance with such developers. It's a solution with a corresponding problem that's high on a lot of people agendas right now. Maybe that's why traffic on our site hit an all time high during last week and downloads of the free Personal Edition of xProcess are growing exponentially.

The interview by the way lasts 5 minutes 20 seconds and is available as an MP3 pod-cast.

JavaOne Feedback

We're preparing to head for the airport in San Francisco so this seems like a good time time to look back on an eventful week at JavaOne. There are so many conversations, new people we've met and significant feedback that we received from people who have used xProcess or were using it for the first time. Ivis didn't have the most conspicuous booth in the Pavillion but somehow word got round that something goodwas going on there and we had excellent traffic through the booth and interest from nearly everyone who stopped by. We also had opportunities for meeting with valued Ivis partners like CollabNet, Apple, Sun and Serena while we were there and the building excitement around both the feature set and architecture of xProcess 2 was very heartening.

One highlight for me was Paul Kuzan's Birds of a Feather session on the Tuesday. Its timing was not ideal - 10.30 to 11.20 on the Tuesday night, competing with many vendor parties, restaurants, bars and simply being in bed ready for a 7am start the next day! Nevertheless we did have a small but very engaged audience to hear Paul explain the principles of xProcess's connected/disconnected architecture built on a file version control system. The penny is gradually dropping that this architecture has significant applications beyond the immediate extensions to xProcess's. Several of the audience who attended and came up to talk to Paul and me after the event had also seen this potential and were keen to discuss further.

The final proof of the JavaOne pudding will be in the eating. Not just the great conversations, record leads generated and subsequent record stats on the web site - it will bejudged on how this exposure leads to actual users of the technology and ultimately delivered business benefits.