Don’t worry, it’s just a procedure
by Alan Cyment
I just called an airline call center to make a short little question on their mileage program. I decided to talk to a person, not a machine. Same result, or worse. I had to answer more than 10 personal questions in order to prove I was myself. After the first five, irritation materialized. I tried to make clear I only needed to make a simple, impersonal question. “Don’t worry Sir, it’s just a procedure”.
Procedures dehumanize activities. Their main goal is to deprive work of any traces of compassion, doubt or rage. Objectivity gets rid of people in order to install clear rules. They are neither good nor bad per se: they are just inert devices put into place by people who decided to deprive a given activity of human spice. They become positive or negative devices when analized in a context. And what is interesting is that, the simpler the context, the more fruitful the use of procedures. Having people produce batches of equally designed hamburguers, with similar raw materials and equivalent physical environments clearly benefits from having a well-defined methodology. Taking a script written hundreds of years ago and putting up a play with dozens of actors that manages to awe spectators usually does not.
You are reading this because you judged your current way of working as fruitless. You are either taking too long to provide a service, building the wrong product, hating to go to the office on Mondays, or maybe all of them together. Put your laptop aside for a second, try and grasp a tiny little piece of blue sky with your sight and think of the procedures that run your work. Think of how many times you fell that the procedure asked you to do things that had no meaningful goal. Remember how many times you knew you could do better. And most important, reflect for a moment on the times you felt relieved because you followed the procedure without caring for the real use of your actions.
Scrum is not a procedure. Scrum should not lead you to have a procedure. Scrum will not get rid of your current procedures, but it will rather help you see just how pointless and expensive they are. You decide to throw them away. You yourself.
Comments
18 June 2009. At last. Alan Cyment’s blog. It’s about time my friend
This is a nice triptych to kick off with. Lots to stir the thoughts and get the pulse going.
“Scrum is not a procedure.” Amen to that.
What a lovely article and how so true.
Locked down procedure gets in the way of human creativity and more often than not common sense when it is most needed.
Reminds me of something recently whereby we had an observation on an audit because we had no written evidence of authority to release. To me documented evidence added no value and was just waste to the process the fact the team released was evidence enough in itself.
Have guidelines and indeed have a framework but allow your people to use their skill, knowledge and judgment to work to the best of their ability within that framework. This allows for common sense and for the person to best adapt to the situation that they face.