Process on a Pedestal

I was recently sent a link to a short video by Gary Vaynerchuk in which he says process shouldn’t be put on a pedestal and processes should be breakable.

You can see it here: Gary on Process

For those that don’t know Gary he’s an entrepreneur from NYC interested in wine, sneakers and baseball cards, and is prone to some interesting business insights. You can find out more about him here

Anyway, this got me thinking.

On this one… I agree with him.

Wait…

What?

A company specifically about improving processes is saying you shouldn’t over-value processes.

Yes, we’re ‘The Better Process Company’ but better processes don’t mean more processes. It means simpler processes, maybe fewer processes.

In the video Gary also says that it’s about culture, about not being political. Too often processes are put in place to manage the interactions between people and teams. I worked on one project where there were a whole raft of processes. Some were there for historical reasons and had never been updated, by a lot of them were just to manage the interaction between teams and their stakeholders. It was ugly. In the end they had one simpler process for handling 95% of their requests.

A good process should act as a guideline for most of what a team does. You can’t plan for every possible eventuality, and even for some things you know are going to happen they might be so rare that building a process for them isn’t worth it. This is where relationships in a team and with stakeholders come into play. With good relationships you can break the process to smoothly handle process exceptions, errors, business changes and those last minute requests from the CEO.