Process People
By Mitch Berg
I got into the world of business (and out of the world of media and/or bars) about fifteen years ago.
After I’d been in the racket about eight or nine years, I remember sitting in a meeting, to meet a new director for an IT department I was with.
“I’m a process person”, he said, confidently.
“Polish up your resume”, I whispered to the co-worker next to me.
I was right, of course. When a person has to advertise himself as a “process person”, it’s generally because they’ve found a) it’s easier than focusing on delivering things, and b) has found a ready-enough market of companies whose intrinsic processes are so dysfunctional that he’s been able to string sort of a career together. Organizations that are dysfunctional enough to need “process people” are generally too hopeless to be fixed by tweaking “process”; they need to be gutted and started over. In the meantime, if you’re stuck with a “process person” for a manager – well, see the beginning of the post.
And it goes double for people who pronounce the word processes like “pro-ses-SEES”.
All by way of saying I’ve lived this video way too many times.
July 29th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
That video is just perfect, as it illustrates that too often in the soul-sucking world of business software, there is no design process. It’s just people making stuff up based on whatever pops into their heads.
July 30th, 2008 at 1:24 am
Ohhhh, how right you are! And it is not just the IT industry, I can personally vouch for that! And it is also not just “processes” – acronyms, beware of execs spouting acronyms!