Agile process development

The what, why, and how of good process

What is process?

As a manager and a fanboy of organizational behavior, I think a lot about process, the specific sequence of steps a team or organization puts in place to define how a certain end should be achieved. It clarifies how something should be done: from how documents are written (e.g., using a specific template) to how hiring decisions are made (e.g., by unanimous team vote).

Illustration of business process by Elizabeth Guthrie

Process is what a team or organization creates when the idiosyncrasy with which something can be done—across people and over time—begins to impose more costs than the costs of standardizing how this something is done.

Performance reviews are a good example. In a small, bootstrapped startup hyperfocused on surviving to the end of the year, employees may be unable to spend the time and effort to create and follow a performance review process that specifies review cadence, performance dimensions, promotion thresholds, etc. This is not to say that reviewing performance isn’t important, but that process-light performance reviews that are informal and variable across reviewers and review cycles may have a time and a place.

Of course, process-light performance reviews don’t scale as a startup grows into a larger company. Reviews may be too…