Processes are as difficult to develop as products, and when considering cultural issues, can be even more difficult.  Unfortunately, developing or improving a process often isn't taken as seriously as a product development effort is... and as a result, the quality of the outputs from such process improvements can have very detrimental impacts on users, who have to try to muddle on, and may find themselves having to build products and fix proceses at the same time.

As an example, I've seen cases in which many different released processes prescribe what is supposed to happen for some activity at a macro level, without breaking down or allocating the steps into meaningful roles that individuals can actually perform. Expectations are set when a process is released that it will produce what it promises; when it doesn't, people are faced with two untennable options - fixing the process, or ignoring it, and they often choose the latter. Read more »

Something I've noticed in conversations lately is a lack of forthrightness in communications.  It seems more and more that people will not provide direct, honest feedback or present their concerns in an unvarnished fashion.  I don't know if that is because they believe it is impolite to provide direct feedback, or if they are concerned their ideas or concerns won't be listened to or addressed, but it seems to be an ever increasing trend that people won't provide direct, honest feedback.  Rather,they sit and stew in silence.

In a conversation, presentation or meeting it's not hard to identify these people.  They are the ones who are sitting quietly, paying attention and seem to be about to explode with nervous energy, yet simply don't contribute.  Or, when they do, their contribution is very indirect.  You can sense there's something more there, something deeper, but trying to extract it can simply drive the concern even deeper. Read more »

I belong to a large Methodist church, and if you know Methodists, you'll appreciate the saying that most Methodists churches are committees masquarading as religions.  Each Methodist church is run by and organized around the committees that help it function.  To the extent that many churches have a committee of committees.  In most Methodist churches, a tremendous amount of work gets done by volunteers who work on committees.

Now, I bring that up because most committees and most teams operate in very much the same way.  People from different backgrounds and with different interests are brought together to attempt to create something of value, pooling their time and resources to gain something greater than the sum of their parts.  Otherwise, we could assign a few people to a task and have each of them work on the task individually and just sum up the work.

Teams and committees fail to work appropriately in several situations: Read more »