Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

Process, Process, Process

Why Process?

Process isn't something you'd freely associate with a high-tech business. All the mythology around high-tech has wild-eyed engineers miraculously conceiving and creating the next great website in the wee hours of the night. A more fluid environment might be the right thing in your early days when you're exploring the frontiers of your business and running short-cycle experiments to see what works. Ultimately, however, this approach will exhaust your resources and prove incompatible with a large-scale system servicing paying customers. You may hear a choice posed between being an agile organization or a process-driven organization: reject this false choice. Having processes doesn't mean you're not agile. Agile development is a set of processes created from a set of principles and your internal processes should be as well. If you want less structure, design your processes at a higher level of abstraction. Ignoring the need for good process design is like denying gravity, because processes occur in any business. It's your job to design them to be focused and effective, instead of diffuse and wasteful. An explicit process design gives you a platform to accomplish that and work on continuous improvement.

In the same way that a well-organized financial plan keeps you from constantly worrying about cash, the right amount of process will free your key creative resources from the daily drudgery of trolling for information and fielding miscellaneous ...