How can organisations make development methods accessible, usable, and continuously evolving rather than shelfware?
Development methods promise improved quality, consistency, and productivity — but in practice they are frequently too large, too rigid, and too hard to navigate for project teams under delivery pressure. This paper identifies the core reasons methods fail to take hold in organisations and proposes LiveMethod: a structured model and intranet-based infrastructure designed to make methods genuinely usable in context.
The LiveMethod model organises any method into three facets — Products, Tasks, and Resources — held in a meta layer, with actual project artefacts managed in a linked content layer. This structure enables powerful capabilities: automated extraction of relevant method fragments for specific roles or project types, customised project plan generation, and controlled method evolution without disrupting production teams.
A pilot implementation at a large telecommunications company demonstrated real benefits — connecting strategy, architecture, and project deliverables in a navigable intranet environment and drawing previously disengaged staff into active participation in strategy and planning. The paper argues that this kind of living, model-driven infrastructure is a prerequisite for sustainable methods adoption and business reengineering at scale.
Pages: 9
Originally published as a conference paper by Graham McLeod in the Advanced Systems Engineering With Objects conference proceedings, circa late 1990s.