Challenging the status quo ….

In my past life, when I was an engineer (I still consider myself one, despite the MBA!)..I used to be quite hung up about processes, code quality, documentation etc to the extent that often my persistence used to tick-off my colleagues who loved coding and didn’t want to be bothered about processes.

Since my MBA however, the passion for processes has not gone away from my life. Now I look for processes in an overall organizational context taking into account business processes, strategic thinking processes, marketing processes, sales processes. I get very unnerved when I see a team investing in building something because they think they should build it. Often the big gap is in – are they the right people, do they have the money to invest, where is the market, which is the best market to go after etc. This due diligence is often missing.

In a business environment, the sheer fluidity of the industry & the technology, requires that the processes themselves be ‘agile’ to incorporate the chanding scenario. Someplaces, I see all kinds of processes in place to address the customer, but miss out on the processes for employee concerns.

Finally, we have the problem where the origanization has put in all the processes in place for employee concerns, customer concerns etc, but then doesn’t have the mindset, nor the will power to actually execute or follow through on those processes. To make it even more messier, they try to cover up the issues, and the disappointment it causes among all the stakeholders is worse. The organization might as well not gone the the distance in trying to create and put in place half baked processes.

So the question really is
- What processes do really matter for a startup, for a large company, etc.