Project Design – Mastering Complexity and Change
July 6, 2009
Large projects are complex, involving multiple products, disciplines, methodologies, techniques, systems and stakeholders. They often fail to meet expectations, schedules and budgets, and results are often poorly validated and managed. Current IT support to project definition, planning, execution and management is fragmented and rigid. Lifecycle data exchange is transformative rather than evolutionary. Innovation is not driven by evolution, embedding experiences and lessons-learned. There are many uncertainties and unknown dependencies in the early phases, many nonproductive meetings, stove-piped and sequential information flows, poor data management, and limited knowledge sharing. Collaborative design, cross-functional team working, and service composition are inhibited. Work environments and user interfaces are rigid and discipline-specific.
This post raises the questions: Are we wrongly trying to generalize and program creative work, collaborative and adaptive environments, and human behavior? Are we doing right to standardize properties, embedding their parameters and values in code? Can this approach serve complex customers with dynamic demands for controlling dependencies, supporting innovation, and automating adaptation? Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this year, Henk De Man of Cordys published two papers on case management at bptrends, one about different modeling approaches, and another about the approach taken by Cordys. This contribution has also been submitted to the OMG as an answer to their dynamic business activity modeling RFI. I recommend these papers to anyone interested in flexible BPMS, and applaud the company for making this information public. These descriptions represent the best I have seen from any vendor in this field.
Our active knowledge architecture approach is well aligned with this proposal from Cordys, though our emphasis is the complex creative and artistic human-interaction processes that are typically organized in projects. Projects are larger and more complex than cases, requiring multi-dimensional modeling and continuous elaboration of project plans as instance level process models. This post explores similarities between case management and process-oriented knowledge architectures, and proposes some additional use cases and solutions that we believe would make case management simpler and more useful for a wider range of dynamic business activities. Rather than defining new languages for different kinds of processes, we believe that a common process modeling core standard should support dialects (or profiles) for different modeling scenarios, such as “BPMN for standard BPMS”, “case management”, and “project planning and execution”. Read the rest of this entry »
Frank Lillehagen
Håvard Jørgensen
Active Knowledge Modeling 