The culture of process

This resource first appeared in issue #91 on 10 Sep 2021 and has tags Managing A Team: Other, Technical Leadership: Other, Strategy: Change Management

The culture of process - Cate Huston

The defining transition between hobbyist and professional, between someone in research who codes a little or does a bit of sysadminning and running a professional team providing research computing and data services, is that you no longer just focus on mean quality but also variance. You’re no longer trying to just get good results, but consistently good results. That means, painful though it might be, introducing some process.

Huston has a few ways to think about process as, frankly, a fabric connecting the team members:

Process as an agreement about how we work.
Process as a way to answer questions.
Process as (documented) culture.

and this suggests a starting point for process - documenting how the team does things, ideally after some discussion, so that as new people join they can get up to speed quickly.

But as a team grows or its needs change, process can’t stay rigid - agreements shift, different questions are asked, culture updates. New processes may need to be created, and old ones retired, ideally after discussion. Huston describes changes to processes in her team - growing the hiring process of a team, trying “process experiments” on a team (and tossing out the ones that didn’t work), and building support for change. She also points out that any process change is going to get a mix of obliging and enthusiastic support, and questioning and out-of-hand disagreement. I don’t know if it’s useful to think of that in terms of personality types, but certainly accepting that any process change will lead to a variety of reactions is important.

Towards the end, Huston emphasizes that with process - as with technical decision logs! - it’s important to explain the why. That helps build agreement, and helps make it clear when it’s time for a process to be updated or retired.