Process Problems Matter More Than People Problems in Engineering Teams
There are no people problems, only process problems. Any time something goes wrong, your first instinct is to blame someone. That instinct is misguided (and is also terrible for morale.) Going over to the sales rep’s desk and saying, “Hey, be more careful next time,” isn’t going to lead to a different outcome. And even if they *try hard*, you’ll still see this same issue in the future with some frequency. Instead, to prevent the problem from recurring, you have to ask: How did we get here? What adjustments must we make to reduce the probability of it happening again? If you don’t feel this way, that’s *also* indicative of a process problem.
Across the engineering industry, it’s common for teams to slip into “agile zombie mode.” The Team regurgitates what’s on a Kanban board each morning while everyone tunes out. Hours of team time are dedicated to pointing out tickets and debating estimates, but no one is sure who the calculations are for.
Completing 1,000 PRs in a week doesn’t matter if they don’t contribute to helping the business. Keep the process lean. Call it out if part of our process is a waste of time. We’re all keepers of our approach. A project is not about code — it’s about delivering value to the customer. Our process is a living thing that we need to keep reflecting on and iterating on. Any process should balance efficiency and stability with the need for innovation and progress. Companies still need to be mature enough to understand that technical problems are, in fact, business problems. The last thing any Engineering organization wants is for teams to slip into “agile zombie mode,” yet industry-wide, it happens. It could be a release system involving many manual steps, which worked when the codebase was 1/10th of its current size. Now it requires an entire release team. Do engineers need to complete a checklist for every Pull Request they merge? Do you still need that on-call rotation where engineers acknowledge and silence alerts 99% of the time?
Teams assigned to these components reduce their ambitions to fix the technical debt. Push back on newcomers’ attempts to settle the debt and ask to get re-assigned elsewhere.
The Team exists in a slow creep/boiling frog situation where existing processes have become ineffective. Despite the shortcomings, the Team keeps following the same process. Maintaining the status quo may be more comfortable, but more effective to remove ineffective methods. Consider declaring bankruptcy in your process. Only some strategies are meant to exist forever. Restart with minor or even no function, and reincorporate the process pieces that solve pain points that arise.
[¹]: Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization?
