Working Around Processes
One of the clearest signs, to me, that a business is in trouble, is when processes need to be worked around because they don’t align with what’s needed for product development.
When I see teams which are loaded with enablers (managers, coaches, mentors, assistants) rather than do-ers (folk actually working on the delivering and improving the product), and it has become common knowledge how to work around processes to get what’s need, it’s a signal, to me, that the company is bogged down in processes.
The focus in all companies should be what they’re delivering to customers, not satisfying tick boxes, because customers don’t care whether the time-sheet system was closed on the right day weeks before the end of a billing period, or whether the process followed can be labelled “Agile”, they care about whether the end product meets their needs, and what a customer cares about is what creates sales, and that allows the business to continue to operate.
The companies I’ve encountered with the highest level of process focus tend to be the ones that are also suffering from declining market share and profits. It’s easy to let a process get out of hand as it’s “enhanced” to adapt to a newly discovered problem, but, sometimes, the resulting enhancement just doesn’t meet the needs of the business (e.g. how valuable is it to have folk billing for something that’s easier to get through the purchasing system, rather than billing for what is actually needed?).
One example of a processes being of negative value, that I personally encountered, was booking travel at Google. There was a convoluted system of budgets, carrying over savings on one trip to use on future trips, and differences between how different flight route budgets were calculated, which led to folk spending hours, or days, working out how to get an occasional first class, long-haul flight and a nice hotel for trips between London and the Google HQ. At Facebook it was basically “Book 28 days or more in advance, in Virgin Atlantic Upper Class, in one of these hotels, done”.
Google lost more working hours to me optimizing each individual trip than Facebook lost for the 10 HQ trips I took in the entire time I worked for them, and that doesn’t include the time, and energy, Google lost to me taking a LHR->SEA->SFO, SFO->LAX->LHR route between London and the Google HQ just to stay in budget. I’m pretty certain the only thing that stopped this causing a noticeable problem was the ridiculously high profit margins, and big bank balance, Google had.
When you next encounter something that feels wrong (e.g. being asked to fill in time sheets weeks ahead of when the work is being done, or seeing teams with less than a 5:1 ratio of do-ers to enablers), ask the question; how will this make our product better?
Sometimes the answer is simply that it wont, and that something that started as a well intentioned, lightweight, process has just got out of hand and needs some “optimization”.