People over Process: Applying It in Real World Software Development

Glen,

I really enjoyed your presentation. It's very courageous.

I'd like to share some ideas if you are interested.

First, what most people don't understand is that a process works a bit like driving a car. A car is a state machine, it has very few states that can easily be identified, but there is an infinite (or nearly infinite) number of "processes" you can execute (park, pass, drive from A to B...). If a car has no lights, well guess what, you can't execute these processes at night... So you should seek to identify the "car" not the process, (good) processes will adapt naturally as your team "drives" the car. In particular you should focus on the things that could be missing (like lights) that make some processes really hard to execute.

Without insight, you can't have the courage to do the right thing, without insight we work like "assets", we do the same thing over and over because "it worked in the past", we take short cuts, because we feel that being courageous is too risky, impossible, will not be understood.... That's what I think what you call the Why.

The big question is can you elaborate insight? I would argue yes and I can explain how. It starts with having the ability to express problem statements independently of any solution.

We can only move forward by developing and harnessing collective intelligence, again otherwise we all believe like a bunch of assets doing the same thing over and over. I really like the work of Prof. Knott in that area.

Once you can elaborate insight, collective intelligence becomes much easier to develop.