Process – Capturing Knowladge

Not long back I was skeptic or rather opponent of process. But lately I discovered that whether you like it or not process it ubiquitous. I found it everywhere wherever I looked, in one form or other.

Take an example of traffic management in a city with sufficient number of private vehicles. What do we expect from a better managed traffic? Smoother drive, higher average speed and lesser accidents. Can we achieve this if we let people drive completely as they wish? Will we have lesser accident if some people follow left hand drive and some right side on the same road? Can we achieve higher average traffic speed on a road if people does not follows lane and keep changing lanes randomly or keep crossing the road at any place randomly? I believe answer to all is no. To achieve better result in all these and many more case, we have to follow certain discipline. Once you come to an implicit understanding between all the drivers on how to conduct on road, I think you have started putting some process in place. This drives one important point that process does not have to be written document. It just understands what to do under certain scenario to get the best result. Documentation is just mean to communicate the process not the process itself. Depending upon situation you can have different process in place to achieve the same objective. You might have different guidelines for driving at night and different for day or even for peak hour. All manufacturing unit follows certain process. We follows certain process to extract iron out of ore to make automobile using various materials. We can find many more examples in our daily life.

So I tried understanding what process is. Here is my understanding of process if I capture it in form of definition. “Its disciplined behavior which captures the knowledge and experience gained over period of time to provide predictable out with higher degree of probability.”

As process capture knowledge and experience, your success depends in many ways on the process you follow. A better process will give you better result and reduces uncertainty. Process with higher probability of defects, higher uncertainties will result in lesser success. Process can increase productivities of a group as such by doing things in a better ways. It also increases productivities by saving effort from re-discovering every thing.

It’s not that all process result in better results. Some definitely results in less than desired. This is especially true of much age old, out of date process. Over period of time, any process takes root in society or groups and becomes custom, laws etc. And some interest group will take shape around it. These groups has vested interest in keeping the process intact. These groups will resist any change. When a process takes such state, it hinders progress, suffocate creativities. Some time even opposition comes just because many people are afraid to deal with uncertainties of transition.

A good process should have following attributes.

1. Predictability: If out come is not predictable even if you follows same steps all the time, I think process is not good. A process must enhance the predictabilities of the outcome.

2. Scalability: Does it scale with size. Process suitable for small size may not be suitable for big size and vice versa. So there is no fit for all process. It has to evolve with the environment.

3. Adaptabilities: Does your process adapt to changed situation. Say for example, in software development we face scenario when we want to make quick release. If my process is not adaptable enough, we will not able to deliver quick release.

4. Mutability: Some time change is so much that just minor adaptation will not be sufficient. Hence the questions come “does my process regenerate itself”. Does it let himself dies after putting in place a new and better process. If not you will end up with out of date rigid process which will not meet your requirements in the changed world.