--Originally published at The Awesome Blog
Having a good process, or trying to improve your process is always a good thing to do. But even if it’s good you have to take into consideration lots of things. This Chapter of the book The Deadline: A novel about project management talks about it in a special way.
Actually good technical workers will focus on improving your project. It doesn’t matter if you tell them to do it or not. One thing you should consider is to use formal process improvement programs. But they cost time and money, and they are not perfect at all.
In fact, during this chapter, Tompkins discovered that the awful Minister Belok stands in his way (again) and sends the MSEI to audit the programs. During the auditions of the first building, Tompkins discovered that some of his employees were using a different approach to tackle the problem, but this doesn’t please the MSEI. In fact, several employees are using similar techniques. For example, the PS-Shop-C Manager actually used Photoshop’s manual in order to establish functional requirements, but they also applied their knowledge to write the non-functional requirements. Once they ended this process they ended up with an unorthodox form, but with excellent content.
This shows that the danger of standard processes is that people will miss chances to take important shortcuts, particularly on overstaffed projects.