alt Hacker NewsBasically, I agree … but …
In my experience, to successfully reduce process, you need to have really good people.
That usually means a heterogeneous mix of skilled, smart, experienced, and creative people that work well as a team, and teams like that, don’t come easily.
People (and teams) are really important, and I believe it’s a mistake to think of them as some kind of interchangeable modules (as is the norm in the tech industry, these days).
So good management is critical. Keeping staff for long periods of time is also critical. If you have a lot of turnover, you need process to regulate the churn. Long-term employees don’t need to be told what to do, in triplicate, every day. They Just Know, and that “tribal knowledge” is the real key. Also, people that have worked together for a long time have significantly reduced communication overhead. A lot of stuff doesn’t need to be said or written down.
This goes double, when working at scale.
All that said, I used to work for a corporation that treated Process as a religion.
They make really, really good stuff (at scale), but the overhead can be unbearable.
They still make good stuff, though, and I haven’t seen anything close, come from less process-driven outfits. Their competitors have just as much process.
I wrote a piece called “Concrete Galoshes”[0], some time ago, that talks about this.
Replies
This. If you have good people, it really doesn't matter what process you use. If you don't have good people, well, it really doesn't matter then, either...
Largely agree. Heavy process is a tool to help less skilled people have output more comparable to more skilled people. But it comes at a cost of making more skilled people less productive. If you can hire small numbers of highly skilled people you can accomplish a lot with little process. Sadly at some scale “hire only really skilled people” becomes basically impossible and process needs to be more heavy to account for that.
This is very true, and I second the importance of long tenure. There is no substitute for it; it helps with product experience, personal relationships, and organizational knowledge.
> In my experience, to successfully reduce process, you need to have really good people.
Yes, but...
Don't all of these Agile methodologies predicate their success on having at least a decent proportion of really good people (including stakeholders!) in the team?
That's the thing all these "easy bake recipe for success" blog posts miss: it's all about the people. I've been in companies with the exact same processes and wildly different outcomes because staff was more competent (which includes soft skills) and experienced.
But that is anathema to tech companies that think having the right X (agile, Spotify guilds, kanban, etc.) will fix everything because that's what they sell to end users.