The unmistakable importance of process

“I’ll never do that again!”, says the young college student, waking up with a hangover after a night of extracurricular activities.  At zu, as we undertake a continuous stream of website projects and reengineerings, we rely on a multi-step process for project development that ensures success and team friendship at the completion. Yet, like the anonymous character in the opening line (okay it was me) this is how we feel when, despite our corporate memory of the price we will pay collectively for failing to follow the proper process, there are times when for one reason or another, we find ourselves working in a way which does not fit our normal project development process.

One of my favourite management books, John Heider’s Tao of Leadership, describes the importance of process. Here is a partial reading:

“Do not lose sight of the single principle: how everything works. When this principle is lost and the method of meditating on process fails, the group becomes mired in intellectual discussion of what could have happened, what should have happened, what this technique or that might do. Soon the group will be quarrelsome and depressed…When a person forgets that all creation is a unity, allegiance goes to lesser wholes such as family, the home team, or the company.”

This is a good description of how the client-contractor team will tend to lose unity and become quarrelsome should it lose focus on the process by which sites are created.

This is why the process must be respected.

This was apparent to Lao Tzu in the 5^th century B.C. and still makes sense today.