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Managed Chaos
Naresh Jain's Random Thoughts on Software Development and Adventure Sports
     
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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:

  1. Frequent delivery
  2. Reflective improvement
  3. Close communication
  4. Focus
  5. Personal safety
  6. Easy access to experts
  7. Strong technical environment
  8. Sunny day visibility
  9. Regular cadence

I would like to add 3 more properties to this list:

  1. High energy
  2. Empowered teams
  3. Disruptive change or Safe-Fail Experimenting

 


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