This Process Management Workbench is intended to serve several purposes:

• For a given project you may want to select and to tailor the work products. To get the work done, you will need to know which the related processes are. These can be listed product by product or alltogether. Future extensions will also provide typical examples as well as tailor-made templates and checklists.
• For a specific assessment you need to make a selection of the relevant processes. After doing so the expected inputs and outputs to these processes will be listed. This part of the evidence assessors are looking for.
• In other cases you may simply want to get an overview of the process reference model as defined by ISO 15504 and related standards. Then you may find it the feature to print out a process with its associated bases practices, the expected outcomes and work products helpful.

The web site provides also a glossary of commonly uses terms and will give you access to the relevant sources.

As soon as the mission is stated, the appointed project manager will start setting up an infrastructure for the project. Answers has to given to questions like:

• What are the expected results?
• What are the required inputs?

To be able to provide an answer, you have to look at the processes and its related base practices, that produce the specific results. For each work product, the associated processes will be listed. In addition to that, the complete set of processes that are relevant for the project are listed too.

The first list on this page contains the input and output work products related to the deliverables of your project. The mandatory products are printed in bold.

To produce the required outputs, the associated processes has to be performed. To be able to do that, the required inputs must be available. These inputs are listed also in this first table. In addition to that, you have to recognise that in general a process may deliver more outputs than only the ones, that are mandatory. This can be prevented by deselecting Base Practices, than not contribute to the production of the mandatory outputs.

The second table is split in two parts. First, all processes contributing to the mandatory outputs are listed. Then the associated processes for each of the selected work products are given. Here you will see what other work products are associated with that process. For each process, there is a link to the complete process description.

The first question for each assessment will be:

>- What are the processes to be evaluated?

As soon as this is decided, the next question will arise:

- What pieces of information will provide objective evidence of process performance?

The input and output work products related to the processes to be evaluated will be one of the sources.

Other sources are the practioners that perform the process as wel as the process owners. Interviews with these persons are the core of each assessment.

All input and output work products that are related to the selected processes are listed first. To see what work products are related to a specific process also process by process lists are presented too. Some of these products will not be part of the outputs from the processes that are selected for the assessment. They will however become relevant, when the root causes of poor process performance has to be analysed in detail.

For an assessment the suppliers are most important, but the lack of appropriate inputs may lead to poor process performance. Therefore, a look at the inputs necessary to perform a process may be worthwile.