Over at Habiblog, David offers us some of his thoughts on process. I think in the extreme cases, David has a point. Being excessively tethered to process may reduce your competitive advantage or turn your business into Initech ("you got the memo about the cover sheets, right?") or it could be a frantic, back-on-its-heels business where you wear out your people and deliver inconsistently over the long-term.

There's a couple of points with which I take issue:

I've seen places where every step was scripted, every decision was pre-made, and every task was strictly documented. These places smelled of the mania of the leadership and the desperation of the employees. Creativity, innovation, insight- all were starved. Productivity is how you measure it, of course, but these places gave themselves high marks. Those places aren"t doing what you would call "well" right now.

I've not worked at the same places yet I have seen these symptoms, but they are symptoms rather than the disease. IBM, known for its straight-laced and engineer-driven culture, is doing well. Their products, Websphere, AIX, AS400, and the Thinkpad are revered in the industry. Each is well-built, featureful, and engineered to work like a draft horse. It's probably occasionally dry to work there, but we're in the business of enhancing shareholder value and the engineered solution with long-term planning maximizes shareholder value for IBM.

Of course, one success story doesn't prove anything, except that perhaps that orderliness and documentation do not by definition stem from mania or only flourish best in creative starvation.

I'm not suggesting that you can or need to design a website or application from the ground up every time, but instead do the engineering work on the platforms and precompile your decisions [Hogan, Limoncelli, 577] with solid processes at the outset. Every product that comes after that and deployed on that standard platform will benefit from a faster time-to-market and less proverbial reinvention of the wheel.

If you've engineered a platform, you'll know its features and bounds and how the application will perform. You move from a "let's try this and see how it works" model (which is fraught with guesswork and often a sinkhole for waste and opportunity costs) to "we'll deploy here with the right resources, beat the competition, and then we can go on to the next thing". Competitive advantage is not only getting that one product out the door ahead of your competitor, it's doing it time and again that takes you to the top. It takes courage to commit resources to something other than hitting the fastball coming right now across the plate, but it's an investment, with attendant risk and reward.

...standard procedures are put in place as a codification of the organization's known best practices

If the research I call out above is true, then standard procedures are like the neural pathways in our brains. The more often a certain route is exercised, the more ingrained it gets, representing our habits, mannerisms, and behaviors- our character. An organization's standard procedures, the research says, are its memory- and the organizationas character is constructed on top of them.

I don't disagree with this point except that it's not a guarantee that your codified process is the known best practice today or ever was at all. Someone may have developed a procedure or tool, or maybe the practice was great (or maybe just good enough) and it was institutionalized to the organization's benefit.

Here's a cautionary note to the new manager or the visionary in your group though: those procedures and neural pathways didn't get there by themselves. They came from somewhere.

For a dynamic organization to conquer new ground, those procedures have to be updated to grow and scale and be leveraged (buzzword!) You can't build servers the same way as you did in 1999. You can't deploy apps on platforms where there's no development support, year after year, and expect to stay competitive.

Someone has to run slightly ahead, looking for the pitfalls and tweaking the procedures or even looking for the leap ahead in process or engineering your next platform, simply so that it will be ready (remember the goal of being more strategic than tactical) when your organization needs it.

In closing, the people innovating in products that bring you revenue or mindshare need not be the same people innovating in process to build strong foundations, but your organization needs both.

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