Monday, November 20, 2006

How do you know how much process is “just right”?

I’m sure we’ve all been in organizations where there was either not enough process, making things crazy and chaotic, or too much process, making it so hard to do anything that we spend all our time trying to get around it. Maybe some of us have been lucky enough to have been in situations where the process was “just right”. It’s possible that we have not even noticed this sublime situation, just because it was “just right’, not in the way, not making us crazy.

Certainly it’s a personal thing – a loose light process may feel ad hoc to some and unnecessarily restrictive to others, but is there some objective way to determine the optimal level? I think so.

The key questions are “what are you really trying to achieve?” and “what is the lightest process that will get me there?” No one tries to make things more difficult or slow down their business, but this is often a result of too much process. This is true whether we are talking about software development, or tracking employees’ vacation time.

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