Observation
Organizations have to become more mature in their processes while they grow. While this is true for all types of organizations, my perspective is an IT and IT related one alone, also being part of other organizations. With complex technologies coming into every aspect of business, individual solutions are being provided by increasingly specialized vendors. With this, the number of service providers, managing products and – more importantly – solutions, the number of involved parties rises, which in turn increases complexity.
Problem
Now that setup of multiple parties involved requires organization to make it work properly. Processes need to be introduced, to track progress, make sure the right parties get the right information at the right time, and progress and outcome are trackable and manageable.
All of the requirements are clear to justify a strict process. Provided they are viewed from the right angle. Participants in the process, staff executing individual steps, have difficulties seeing the purpose.
Improvement
A transparent process is easier to follow for individual contributors. Management needs to feed back outcome of work, results to their staff. When everybody understand what he is doing, less steps will be done wrong. Eventually it will even take out complexity out of some processes, because transparency can help avoid the need for exceptions to be built in.
Please share your thoughts!