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Good process is all about ensuring that expectations are clear and shared across the company. It does not meant that there's no room for judgement or that it t
by mason55 8y ago
Good process is all about ensuring that expectations are clear and shared across the company. It does not meant that there's no room for judgement or that it treats every employee as a mindless automaton.
Everyone follows a process - the only difference is that if you write it down then you have a hope of everyone following a similar process. If you don't write it down then everyone just follows their own slightly different process.
This doesn't even touch on why process is good for scaling a company. It's easy to have everyone work to a standard process that isn't written down when there's five developers that sit in a room together. But at a certain point you're going to have to hire new employees and you'll need to communicate to them what the expectations are. You'll eventually have to hire "cogs" who aren't rockstars who just know what to do. You'll have people working in different offices and across timezones. Again, these people will all follow A process. By writing it down you can help ensure that they follow the process you want them to follow.
- petermcneeley 8y agoIve seen many scaling issues so far as well. However I tend to think that this is a problem with coherence in discipline of the hierarchy. Person A always breaking the build now just becomes Team A breaking the build. So even still why not simply just use process despite its drawbacks of rigidity since it will still at least solve your problems. The answer is that just like corruption no finite set of laws will ever be enough to curb an underlying behavior. This is why things like mandatory code reviews are pointless unless people take them seriously
- kthejoker2 8y agoSo part of process includes disciplining those who fail to adhere to it. Not sure why firing person A is somehow a failure of process in your book. Whereas without process what basis would you have for declaring person A out of band?
- petermcneeley 8y agoFor small groups there is little difference between firing a person for not following cultural and authoritative norms vs constructing process around those and then firing when those are violated. The written process is merely a concrete representation for what is already known by the nominal parties.