I wrote a post about Process is King a few years ago. Came across a few posts about how people trump process. That may be for small de minimus work efforts. But those same voices conjecturing people come first - always! fail to put those people in a process that can guide their success.
People without process is an undirected effort and where I work, that's called waste
Just a reminder about the spectrum of processes for writing software for money
Notice the uncontrolled aspects of winging it. If you work where no one really cares when you're done, what you produce - other than the next most important thing - how much it'll cost in the end, then winging it is the right approach.
If you work where there is a business need to show up on time, for the needed budget, with the needed capabilities, to meet the business goals, in order to stay in business then winging it is probably not the path you want.
Misquoting Deming
Since many in the agile community like to quote Deming, let's look at what he says about process
- I should estimate that in my experience most troubles and most possibilities for improvement add up to the proportions something like this:
94% belongs to the system (responsibility of management) 6% special
- Process guides all we do when spending other people's money
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There are four prongs of quality and four ways to improve quality of product and service:
- Innovation in product and service
- Innovation in process
- Improvement of existing product and service
- Improvement of existing processThe common mistake is the supposition that quality is ensured by No. 4, improvement of process, that operations going off without a blemish on the factory floor, in the bank, in the hotel will ensure quality. Good operations are essential, yet they do not ensure quality. Quality is made in the boardroom.
A bank that failed last week may have had excellent operations— speed at the tellers’ windows with few mistakes; few mistakes in bank statements; likewise in the calculation of interest and of penalties and loans. The cause of failure at the bank was bad management, not operations.
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Our system of make-and-inspect, which if applied to making toast would be expressed: “You burn, I’ll scrape.”
- The naive notion of perform, inspect, and correct is wasted effort unless there is a plan to perform to. An established goal, with risk-adjusted processes to reach that goal.
- This is the very definition of closed loop control
- There is no such thing as arrival exactly on time. In fact, exactly on time cannot be defined.
- All project work operated in the presence of uncertainty - reducible and irreducible
- Managing in the presence of uncertainty requires making estimates.
- Success on projects cannot be achieved without estimating the impacts of uncertainty and the resulting risk and taking corrective actions to mitigate those risks. No Estimates is a Hoax.
- A bad System will beat a good person every time
- It's the process that makes people successful.
- The System of Profound Knowledge provides a lens. It provides a new map of theory by which to understand and optimize that we work in, and thus to make a contribution to the whole country.
- Some in the agile community like to quote system thinking without actually knowing what that means and more likely not practicing systems thinking and systems engineering
- Systems Engineering as the systematic (through an appropriate process) application of Systems Thinking, to a problem in the Engineering domain.
- Here's a concise comparison of the two and how they support each other "How Systems Thinking Contributes to Systems Engineering"
So when you hear something like this ...
It's not true in the absence of process and the tools that support that process. People execute the process. People are guided by process. People follow the process to produce the needed quality, for the needed budget, at the needed time. This is what the business pays them for. This work can range from production line assembly of Toyota's to pure research and development.
People are an important part of the process, they do not replace or supplant process.
Process is King.
Anyone telling your otherwise works in a de minimus domain
