Sadly (for me) the chap who coded the platform from source had the temerity to get himself a full-time job, but was kind enough to apply the various hotfixes and updates so that I wasn’t pestered with emails anymore.
He also gave me the delightful news that, given I was running an older version of Heroku which is due to go EoL (End of Life) in the next year or two, I would be better off recoding the platform from scratch rather than trying the upgrade path.
Sidebar: What does Heroku do? Apparently, it takes HTML-based text and turns it into a PDF format. Who knew?!
Fast-forward a number of months and I find myself at the ITAM Review Wisdom event, and who should be there? David Foxen of SAM Beast Consulting, Kylie Fowler from ITAM Intelligence and all the crew from Licenseware. The guys from Licenseware asked me “What project can we work on next?”
That’s when lightning struck and I suggested that we re-platform the SAM Charter Maturity Assessment on Licenseware technology, but make it a combined effort between David, Kylie, Licenseware and myself (strength in numbers and all of that!).
Fast-forward 7 months, and the productivity cogs are slowly turning and David, Kylie and I are overhauling the content to ensure it aligns to ISO 19770-1. In the meantime, Ciprian, Alex and Chris are preparing the technological path to enable us to drop in the content and present you all with a dynamic and forward-leaning maturity assessment that also builds in an ability to assess both process maturity AND process capability.
“What’s the difference?” I hear you ask.
Process maturity measures how well you manage your processes – are the critical ones documented? Are they reviewed regularly? Can you demonstrate that they are aligned to your organisation’s IT and business strategies?
On the other hand, process capability maturity seeks to understand whether the activities performed in the process are the right ones – it’s related to process maturity because unless you perform regular reviews, you can’t know what the ‘right ones’ are… but equally valid is a decision to NOT perform a capability because it’s not a priority for you. To understand what capabilities organisations should be considering, we raided the ITAM Accelerate Process Kit to allow us to assess if the processes achieve the specific capabilities that separate best practice from also-ran.
The platform will be carrying over all the features and benefits of the former platform (white-labelling, “loop in a colleague”, customisation of questions, customisation of reporting etc.) as well as flexibility around whether HAM or SAM questions form the body of your report.
So if you have any features you’ve seen in other assessments that you would like us to consider then why not let Kylie or I know?