Practitioner-led Process Improvement:For “sticky” processes
In previous posts, we have seen how to use the Six Honest Serving Men to define the elements of a process, while keeping it from becoming stupid. In the latter, one of the items we briefly touched upon was to make Process definition “Practitioner-led.” Today, we’ll dive into this inclusive way a little more.
[In industry jargon, Practitioners are the people who perform the tasks indicated by the process - software development teams, for example.]
Why Practitioners have to participate in process definition? Some common objections encountered are:
- They are not experts in process development
- It is not in their job description or they have other work to do
- If they do it, why do we need process specialists?
While these are valid to some extent, lack of ownership of the very people who have to use the process is the single biggest reason for failure of processes. This isolationist, ivory-tower approach results in processes that are out of touch with reality, do not take into account established practices and a general feeling of “process policing” among the development and project management community.
Most people that I encounter, including die-hard Agile champions, agree that some agreement on how things will be done is necessary when such activities involve many people. A process is such an agreement. When we trust people to develop mission-critical software for us, it is foolish to think that they cannot define an effective way of doing things!
Are you convinced yet? If yes, let us move on and see how we can implement this effective means of defining processes. The title points below are meaningful enough without me trying to elaborate on them.
- Assemble the right team
- Identifying process requirements
- Identifying current practices
- Defining the process
- Piloting
- Implementing
Assembling the right team is probably the most important part of this whole exercise. You need to bring in people of all kinds. You need process champions, critics as well as technical experts.
What about you? You are there to assist them in wording the process, doing the documentation work, creating simple flows and probably to see that process requirements are defined right.
One other thing I have found helpful is to incorporate as many current practices, documents and tools as possible. To do this, you as the process specialist have to talk to people, do the research and generally make it easy for the team to define the process.
A good Practitioner-led process improvement initiative reduces the inertia and encourages others to follow what has been defined by their fellow clan members.
In fact, many guidelines from the SEI show that the use of practitioner-led process improvement journeys lead to sustained improvements in appraisal ratings as well as in achieving project maturity.
Share with me your stories, criticisms and your experiences in the comments below.
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