The more important a production or development task is, the less people follow established work processes. I don’t understand this. We did not make specification, documentation, and testing requirements to while away the lonely morning hours. We made them so we could avoid error, track progress, predict problem spots, and recognize when a project is complete.
If there’s anything that _needs_ this kind of attention to detail it is the high-profile and urgent task. Yet these are the first things to disappear. That happens universally: government work, non-profit work, corporate work — even personal work. The only place I’ve ever seen process adhered to as though it were holy writ was a newspaper. I was frequently busy, often stressed, but _rarely_ unable to explain exactly what was going on.
I hear submarines are also good places to find that kind of discipline. The serious consequences of error encourage it.
When a project falters or — heaven forbid — fails, people implement “a better process.” This is a waste of time. You waste time writing a gold-plated process, and then you waste time implementing it on more mundane or trivial tasks. When the old process worked just fine for those.
And then, when something urgent comes along, is the new process followed? Of course not. We “make an exception in the interests of time.” And ultimately you haven’t gained anything. Worse, as the process becomes more onerous, you find more and more projects become urgent exceptions in the interest of time.
The problem is not the process. The problem is that no one follows the process.
The solution I’d like to recommend is to meticulously enforce process on urgent, special projects, then relax them for the trivial and mundane. That encourages foresight and planning and discourage the last-minute and unique. I’d like to see someone try that. Preferably I’d be around when they did it.
