Defining Process Success
Often companies ask me:
“How do we know if this process is successful? How do we measure if this process is working for us?”
I don’t think any process by itself can make someone successful. A lot depends on the company, its values, principles, nature of business, its people and so on.
If I wanted to introduce a new process into my company, this is what I would measure or look for:
- Is it helping my product/organization? Things like
- time to market,
- frequency of releases,
- perceived quality/stability of the product and so on.
- Basically aspects about my product delivery which were good (want to continue doing them) and aspects which needs improvement.
- Is the team evolving the process? Are they internalizing the process and reducing the amount of ceremony?
- While the process should encourage people to do reflective improvement, it should also encourage some amount of disruptive changes thinking into the teams/company.
- Is the process creating growth opportunities for my people?
- I would like the process to encourage growth in terms of them becoming Generalizing specialists and not being corned into silos.
- I want my people to improve their overall understanding and involvement in the overall product development process rather than just knowing or caring about their little piece.
Also Jeff Patton has a wonderful article on Performing a simple process health checkup:
He suggests we look for the following “properties” to assess the process’ health:
- Frequent delivery
- Reflective improvement
- Close communication
- Focus
- Personal safety
- Easy access to experts
- Strong technical environment
- Sunny day visibility
- Regular cadence
I would like to add 3 more properties to this list:
- High energy
- Empowered teams
- Disruptive change or Safe-Fail Experimenting