Tuesday, February 26, 2002

 
Posted by Mike Tarrani 11:32 PM
Practices and Processes. Today's theme spotlights best practices, processes and process improvement. These will add more depth to the security and project management topics that Linda and I have recently been discussing.

Best Practices. One amazing source of best practices is the California Health and Human Services Data Center (HHSDC). This page provides their Systems Integration Divisions (SIDs) Best Practices Website for Systems Acquisition. An example that shows why I'm so excited about this resource is the Project Office Support Tool (POST) Enterprise page. The site has a wealth of information and assets, such as project templates, a Software Acquisition CMM page and a complete set of life cycle processes.

Processes. The Process Group has a content-rich site that is focused on processes, with an emphasis on software development processes. Despite the emphasis, much of the material also applies to service delivery and IT operations. Their newsletter is excellent and available as a free e-mail subscription.

The co-founders of The Process Group have also published a book titled Making Process Improvement Work: A Concise Action Guide for Software Managers and Practitioners that will be available on 29 March 2002. For a look at the approach that the authors take, read their article titled Goal-Problem Approach for Scoping an Improvement Program that was published in the May 2000 issue of CrossTalk Magazine.

Process Improvement. The authors of Goal-Problem Approach for Scoping an Improvement Program, Neil Potter and Mary Sakry, wrote an article for the May 2000 issue of STQE titled Measuring Process Improvement: Tracking your project goals that addresses project issues in software development and quality management. I've added a PowerPoint presentation on models for software process improvement to my site to augment the article. Enjoy.

End Notes: I'm going to wrap this up with some papers that will be of interest to anyone who is interested in IT process improvement, operations management or service level management:

• How to Support the Negotiation of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for Your Client/Server Application
• Information Systems Sourcing Prototypes
• Modeling IT Operations to Derive Provider Accepted Management Tools and the companion paper, Process oriented Approach to Develop Provider accepted Management Tools
• Specification of a Service Management Architecture to Run Distributed and Networked Systems
• Development Framework for Service-Oriented Application Instrumentation and SAP R/3 Model

One final paper that may be of interest is a dissertation titled Information Technology Implementation Issues: An Analysis. This research project addresses the issues affecting information technology development and deployment. The issues represented in this study are addressed in the context of IT implementation processes, especially with regard to the question of the needs and perceptions of administrators from the local government arena. You can download the thesis in PDF format.