Process Management & Process Fusion

Innovation and Technology both require comprehensive management - while there are quite a few paradigms out there already in regards to assuring best practices in program/project or portfolio management, none of them seems to have yet been able to wrap everything together seamlessly.  We are going to examine this problem space in the context of something we refer to as Program Lifecycle Management (PLM), which we will define in a future post. Today we're going to look at one part of the program management equation - Process.

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. More often than not however, larger organizations are finding that they have to deal with multiple types or levels of process management. For example, an organization may employ one or more SDLCs (Software Development Lifecycles) as well as a variety of solutions that manage workflows and business rules. The government considers Lifecycle Management so important that it is restructuring various DoD commands as "Lifecycle Management Centers."

One of the better known examples of an SDLC* is CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration). 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 counter-intuitive 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 (which is what most people view as PLM today) is becoming especially dependent upon the successful implementation of Agile processes, given the ever-decreasing sales and product development lifecycles.

Process Fusion, defined
Process Fusion is a realization that processes or process families 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. This can be applied in the context of a single solution lifecycle or hundreds depending upon the scope of the organization involved. Process Fusion requires mapping of key elements of process with one another to ensure that all aspects of complex programs remain coordinated.

Process Fusion requires automation and a comprehensive management paradigm...

* some would contend that CMMI is used for more than software development, however it is still a software development lifecycle approach at its core. 

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