Minding the Machines

CHAPTER 3Process

How to establish productive processes that enable the effective planning, delivery, and sustainment of analytical projects, programs, and products.

W. E. Deming, the guru of quality, said of process, “If you can't describe what you are doing as a process, you don't know what you're doing.” Paradoxically, while practitioners are highly skilled at breaking down a business problem into their individually optimizable components, the processes by which they operate internally have the tendency to be ad hoc and reactive. It is critical for practitioners to maintain flexibility and adapt their working style to support the stakeholders they are engaged with; however, having deficiencies and inconsistencies in intake, delivery, and communication will invariably lead to poor stakeholder experience and ultimately to poor project outcomes. Maintaining structure around these elements reduces operational friction, improves cognitive fluency, and lets the focus remain on the work; the processes must be managed before the people.

Process simply describes how things are done, a series of actions or steps taken to accomplish a distinct goal. When fully described and sequenced, processes lay out how people and equipment produce a product or service. Once a process has been deconstructed into discrete actions, those actions can be more easily optimized. Scientific management took this idea to the extreme in the 1920s. Frederick Taylor, the leader of the efficiency movement, ...