Do you have a healthy relationship with your process?

Processes can be difficult mates, what type of relationship do you have with yours?

Controlling

No you don’t control your process it is controlling you. Devised by a power-hungry manager, designed to ensure you conform and waste your time with endless documentation, your process defines your work. The only thinking required is when you try to fit a square peg into your round holed process. You care little for anyone else including your customer. Your greatest fear is that your process will change and those insecurities about the value of your work will be outed. Your fears are well founded, you’ll be easy fodder in the next round of redundancies.

Sycophantic

You go gooey eyed at the mention of it and can find no fault in your beloved process. You preach with religious fervor to family, friends although probably not to your colleagues who may be a little cynical and prefer to just get on with delivering stuff. It’s unlikely that you are really doing what you believe in although you may be suffering from denial and be conveniently ignoring the bits of your process that required real change. Your devotion may have been triggered by an early experiment the results of which you still cling to. You believe that if you follow the process good things will happen but your missing any real purpose.

Promiscuous

You say “Process X was so last decade! Y is where it’s at, all the Thought Leaders are saying it so it must be true”. Once you realise Y isn’t really working you can jump on the Z bandwagon. You’ve never stuck with anything long enough to get a real understanding of it and like the Sycophant care more about the process than its purpose.

Healthy

Although your process may have been used by others before you’ve made it your own. You share the same principles and have a deep understanding of them. You give each other the freedom to make new discoveries. You’re both idealistic and pragmatic. You have a little poster of the agile manifesto by your desk to remind yourself what its all really about: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.

Tags: Agile, kanban, process, Scrum