Today I created a Jira ticket to request data access. Five people had to approve it. No one did anything wrong. Everything followed the process. It still felt salty.
Process is like salt. Necessary, but easy to overuse. & teams rarely break from too little process. They break from too much.
When food turns out too salty, people rarely think they added too much. They assume they need a better recipe. Or another layer of control.
Last year I looked at a 12-person team’s product development flow. Nearly 70 steps, copied from a Fortune 500 company. Every step made sense at a Fortune 500. At 12 people, it was a straitjacket. Features that used to take two weeks now took eight. Standups ran close to an hour. Just to report status.
The recipe wasn’t wrong. The context was.
I was on a six-person squad. The process had grown so complex we couldn’t track it with normal tools. We ended up building a 15-tab Excel file, giant charts everywhere, just to manage the process itself. Six people. The process needed its own project manager.
Agile falls into this too. Sprints, standups, retros, all there. But waterfall doesn’t disappear. It just gets sliced into smaller pieces.
That Jira ticket got approved three days later. By then I’d already found the data myself. Took five minutes.
Reach me if you have other perspectives, or just want to say hello.
Say something.