What’s that again? You may have heard this term if you’re a manager or worked closely with one, via an endearing statement like “This is absolute chaos! We need to create a process around this” Weekly syncs, all-hands meetings, release cycles, triage flows et al. are places where process shows up. Most people hate it and rightfully so, but should they?

Process keeps momentum going

We need to recall some famous words by the worlds first true management guru: Isaac Newton! So this guy once said, “A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force”, apparently it’s called the first law of motion. In other words: You’ll keep doing things you’re doing unless someone shakes things up a bit. Now why is this is relevant to how we do work. Because doing work too has a kind of inertia and is subject to all sorts of external forces. Imagine, a person given a task to finish. In an ideal world, this person is like a little ball rolling down a slope. You can just need to give it a little push and the thing keeps moving on its own. But then of course, reality is far from ideal, even for the most motivated people and teams, going through a project is only sometimes like smoothly rolling down a slope, usually it’s more like pushing yourself up a slope or just flatland where you’re dragging yourself along.  This is where process comes in, it’s a periodic intervention to balance the external forces always out there to derail your project, your culture and your systems. But frequently doing syncs, checking in on progress, sending status reports, etc., you ensure that loss of momentum is caught early and balanced out. Process fight chaos and ad-hoc efforts “If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six hours sharpening my axe” - Abraham Lincoln  If someone wants to do something, they can either put some thought and effort into planning the activity, cut it into manageable chunks and do work at a steady pace OR they can just work as they please, do bits of work here and there and very likely suffer heartburn and burn midnight oil as a the deadline approaches. Without a process around how work how should flow.  For example, If you have 100 days to build a piece of software, with proper planning you can use 20 to design, 40 to build most of it, 20 to test and fix bugs, and a final 20 for last minute polishing.  Without planning, you’ll be looking sitting on the 90th day after finishing development thinking “Crap! It’ll to take another 40 days to test and polish this for release”

Good and bad kinds of processes

Process is good when:

• It’s bottom up
• Everyone understands why they’re doing it 
• It’s flexible and adapts when needed (“No agenda items. Lets cancel the meeting and go for drinks!”)
• Efforts in process complement the actual work (“Those weekly reports will help you write your annual performance summary”)  Process feels bad when:
• It’s top down 
• Managers want to try out stuff they read about (“Let’s try Scrum!”)
• Process is rigid and unquestionable (“That’s how it works here”)
• Outcomes of processes are irrelevant to the actual work (“No one is reading the wiki”)