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.
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.
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!