Practical Agile

A tale of two restaurants

Joe was hungry. He was on a business trip, and it was lunchtime, and he just entered Bologna, an Italian restaurant.

It took almost 3 minutes before a host led him to a table, which was set up simply, yet invitingly. There were some loud voices from the kitchen, and Joe wondered what they are arguing about. When the waitress came back he ordered a pizza, which he noticed was recommended in reviews on TripAdvisor. While he was waiting for his order, he saw the staff going around customers - acting nice, but not overly nice, smiling from time to time, but not overly eager.

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Process is always more important than content

We got this one wrong, us the IT people. We view process through a rather narrow prism, so much that we grew to value “Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools”. But process is way more than just a set of activities that get executed in a specific order.

Wikipedia alone has about 40 different disambiguation values when looking up “Process”. But the most concise definition is the following: “A process is a set of activities that interact to achieve a result”.

In many ways when we talk about a process we omit the latter part: “that interact to achieve a result”.

Start with basics

Take chemical processes, as an analogy. Say you want to make mayonnaise. You take an egg, oil, lemon, mustard, seasoning, and combine them in a very specific order. Should you change the order to activities, you might spoil the process, and get something, which might be tasty, but is ultimately not mayonnaise. That’s the set of activities involved in the process.

But the ingredients also interact to cause a certain set of chemical reactions. Without those interactions you will not have a mayonnaise, either. For example, if you used a boiled egg or a stale lemon, you are unlikely to achieve the desired result.

What more, if you get the ingredients and do -nothing-, other unplanned (and undesired) additional chemical processes will interact and prevent you from using those same ingredients for your desired gourmet mayonnaise. Your egg will go off, your lemon will become moldy, well, you get the point.

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