Following Process vs. Doing What's Right

Image by laverrue via Flickr

It seems counter-intuitive to contrast the idea of "following process" with "doing the right thing". After all, process is established in order to make sure a team of people does the right thing. So how come we end up having to choose?

(Note: This post is about start-ups vs. older companies and a little about project management/getting things done. The dilemma definitely applies to both. )

On one end of the spectrum are start-ups...
At this level, there's little process, but everyone on the team is fueled by the idea of doing the right thing. And it works. The catch? It doesn't scale. Adding more people without having any sort of process only increases chaos instead of relieving those who are burned out. It's the same concept with managing a small team. You'll get things done without process, but not in a pleasant way, and certainly not very efficiently.

At the other end of the spectrum are large, mainly bureaucratic companies.
I think the downfall of many bureaucratic organizations is that process is meant to get a few (typical) things accomplished. As soon as the rules switch or the input varies outside the foreseen parameters, the process doesn't work. It's like writing a computer program that expects the user to enter positive integers. When a user happens to enter a negative number or a fraction, the program will try to run, but it'll either break or spew out nonsense.

I haven't stumbled upon any golden nuggets here. All I know is that getting to a step where teams follow a process is hard work. Getting a team to then stray from the process in order to do the right thing in edge situations is even harder work, of a different kind.