People and Process

Been a long time since I posted here! I guess between Facebook and G+ and other platforms it started to seem redundant to post here as well though the long form available as a blogger still has a place. It's been a really busy month with a bunch of travel for work and some major changes at the office. I've been thinking a lot about people I work with and breaking them into 2 groups - the process oriented people who are most concerned with creating and following procedures, and the outcome oriented people who are most concerned with the results achieved. There are places for both types of people in an organization, though I tend to gravitate towards the outcome oriented people myself. What I think happens in large businesses is that the process oriented people get let to create and manage the processes (because it's their inclination anyway). Soon you have lots of rules and structures built to support the business, and for a while things go well. Unfortunately, over time, more and more process gets added to cover more and more picayune things, and the environment changes making some of the processes unnecessary and necessitating new processes. At a certain point you realize that your staff are spending more time on process than they are on productive work. I think businesses should periodically do a process review to identify where they are on this spectrum and root out useless process. The benefits from this would be: 1. A smaller, but more relevant cannon of useful and necessary processes and procedures, 2. Less time spent by employees having to learn and re-learn processes that govern occasional behaviors (I think most of the pain with complex process comes from occasional participants who don't need to follow a specific process often enough to really learn it, but do it often enough that their lack of familiarity is a problem), 3. Better structured processes that effectively support the business, 4. A regular offportunity to reconsider processes and automation to identify chances to make things work better. I suppose this is a short post on a complicated topic - next time I'll try to cover how I think this preference manifests itself in technology through system design.