Why do we make processes?

ian@ClearNetSec.com (Ian S. Nelson) — Sat, 09 Jun 2007 10:52:00 -0600

I recently went on a vacation to Scotland. While I was there, I read a wonderful book about St. Kilda and the near utopian society that lived there until 1930, it is no uninhabited. St. Kilda is one of the most remote Hebrides and it's a particularly rocky set of islands that isn't very easy to approach by boat. It had been inhabited for at least 2000 years and isolated from the rest of the world for most of that time. As a result the islanders depended upon each other a great deal. Everyone had a say on every issue, they shared resources, crime didn't really exist. And then the outside world crashed in on them, people started visiting the island as tourists and eventually the St. Kildans' culture fell apart and they asked to be evacuated from the island.

What was fascinating to me is that Kilda wasn't utpoian by design, it was by need. Everyone depended upon everyone else on the island of only a couple hundred people. There weren't people that just did nothing while other people caught food. (Also fascinating, they didn't fish, they were fowlers and climbed up cliffs and caught sea birds) Every single member of the society pulled their weight and did something that the whole group needed. They had no leader, they had a daily "parliament" in which every man got to talk and an equal vote. While it wasn't easy living, outsides that looked in described the society as a utopia. Even more remarkably, every person on the island was equal when in the rest of the British Isles clans and royalty controlled society.

I compare this to the software industry. At only two companies have I ever seen "the process" work. One was IBM and it worked because everyone was dedicated to making it work and there were a lot of full time process people that pushed the process through as well as a couple super heroes that did above and beyond the call of duty to keep things floating. It was very expensive to make software and, honestly, it wasn't the most fun I've ever had. The other was a small startup where we had almost no management and a very tight team of developers and testers that all wanted to make the company successful; the executive staff was completely hands off. People didn't simply do their job and throw some output over the fence, everyone did more than their job description and there was almost no outside pressure in and we were fairly Agile and had enough process to provide some safety nets but we moved quickly. Also, everyone on the team didn't know anything but success, there was a lot of pride and "good enough" wasn't good enough for us and it was great while it lasted.

Everywhere else, they pretended. Process wasn't a need, so much as an excuse. (The lack of any process is the same thing, it's a process in its own right and there are usually bullies somewhere in the organization and it involves some sort of punishment feedback loop) I had this great experience once where I was encouraged to push back, but not until I exhausted every other option (that meant working 10+ hours 7 days a week, or at least that is how it was measured when you did "push back..") which is silly because it requires you to actually fail to prove that the plan didn't work in the first place. I'm watching it on a great scale now, there is a great effort being made to appear to follow a process but there really isn't one. It's easy for everyone to "do" the process but simply "doing" it doesn't make the product better or reduce risk or really even mean much of anything. It requires collective discipline, collective sacrifice and compromise, collective give and take and a lot of trust. Everyone in the organization has to take part, every single stakeholder has to be part of it. No process can create time when there isn't any or make an average team in to a great team. It's easy to pretend though. I'll talk more about that next time.

ClearNet Security: Tag processes

Why do we make processes?