by Rainer Volz
The first column in the new year might be the appropriate place to look at possible new developments in project management. A topic with growing importance is work flow or process management. This topic seems to be important as an object of projects, as the development of knowledge and process know-how is playing a more crucial role in information-based economies. But, and that is our primary interest here, it is also important as one of the tools managers might use in their projects.
A while ago everybody had to create or at least select a methodology, which was done mostly in paper. Paper that was then shelved and often never seen again. To avoid that, the paper then was transformed into HTML, published for perusal by employees. Still a bit passive, people had to actively search for the information to carry out their part in a specific process, the process information and methodology of an organisation was often not integrated into the tools used to accomplish the tasks.
Nowadays there are PM tools on the market that provide a more active process support, by providing standard methodology and process libraries, or by providing the possibility to link in the existing recipes, templates and other documentation of an organisation. The documentation is directly accessible in the application used in a project. The possibilities to provide an even more active process support -- customised software modules for providing assistance, error and approval checking, document routing and workload balancing etc. -- are often restricted by the effort necessary to develop and maintain these modules. Some products, often the larger PM/PSA systems, allow to customise the process functionality they provide to do just that, but there is often the help of the IT department necessary. The involvement of the IT department means often a significant investment for a manager. Besides the budget required to maintain the component needed, there is often a lot of time necessary to communicate (translate) the requirements of the business or project into IT terms, and to validate the results.
The appearance of new work flow, business process and business rules management software could help to reduce the effort needed to adapt process execution environments to changing requirements of projects and businesses. The BPM and related industries provide a number of standardised process definition and execution languages, languages that want to make it possible to execute processes on various platforms or to orchestrate the processes of different systems or organisations in different contexts. Although this could help, especially when trying to collaborate in a project with multiple participating organisations and their systems, all these process solution would still have to be implemented or configured by the IT.
But a key aspect of these development is to bring the process control to the users. With business rule software or systems based on ontology developers try to make it possible that an end-user in a project can define her own process, whose definitions would then be mapped onto IT resources and executed. Such a scenario would even enable projects with shorter durations to create their own processes inside the process frameworks of their organisations.
So, what is the point here? Shouldn't we simply wait until the technology is ready and we can buy and simply use the necessary technology in our projects? A possible problem there is the lack of standards for automated processing and machine-reasoning in the subject area of project management. Processes are specified in terms, these terms must be defined and agreed, especially when the processes should be used across companies or in distributed organisations. For many business areas there are already electronic standards and ontologies in progress (examples see Open Applications Group or OASIS), but it seems to me not for project management.
If you look at these standards you will quickly notice that there is Legal XML, electronic business XML (ebXML), even Tax XML, but no Project XML(or PM OWL). One of the last initiatives I know of was PMXML, a XML vocabulary intended for the exchange of task planning and tracking information, which seems to be dead by now (for the curious, Pacific Edge Software still provides the schema, my summary
Russell Archibald lists in this this issue the various initiatives to provide process support for project management, but most of the publications seem to be still in a passive "information display" stage. They provide reading material (PMBOK, Prince) and templates for humans, but for a more active support of organisational and management processes the vocabulary and processes should also be published in machine-readable formats, ideally by international standards bodies, with automated execution between organisations in mind.
Dieter E. Jenz described in a recent BPTrends article a vision for reusing industry-wide standard ontologies and adapting their pre-defined processes and vocabularies for the individual businesses, so that end-users would be enabled to tailor them to their needs. Admittedly, the scenario described there are not yet business reality, but standards development takes time. Or is there no need for active, automated process support, electronic communication of project management information, cross-organisational management process execution in projects?
copyright® 2003 Rainer Volz
Follow Rainer Volz's Web-based PM Groupware discussion through his previous PM World Today Viewpoints Columns.
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