Yes, but what are processes for?

Just this morning I was talking to a colleague about scaling methodology, and how often organisations seem to lump quite diverse projects and tasks together as small/medium/large (or something like that), and force everything into what is often a quite inappropriate (not to say brainless) approach. So we end up insisting that some major document is produced or some sign-off given that is wholly irrelevant or out of proportion to the problem the work is designed to solve or the real problems it might face. But we do it anyway, apparently for want of any clearer idea of what we should be doing.

My suggestion was simple in concept, although I suspect that most organisations would have difficulty making it real. It is based on the principle that methods, processes, standards and procedures exist for just one reason – to control a risk. We don’t have standards and procedures for things that can be assumed any way. For example, shortly after the fall of the Soviet system, I was working on a group of projects for the EU (the old EC Phare programme) in Poland. While I was there I discovered that the electricity was so erratic that I would have been ill-advised to plug in my laptop, and that in most factories there was no loo paper because it was a precious commodity that was usually nicked as soon as it was put it. So my personal ‘being a consultant in Poland’ procedure included ‘leave your laptop in the hotel’ (where the current was more reliable) and ‘put some toilet paper in your briefcase’. But of course these weren’t risks here in the UK. So they are not in my ‘methodology’ here.

And so it should be for any methodology or process: if it is not controlling a risk, take it out. Likewise, if you don’t know what risk you are controlling, find out what it is and adapt the process accordingly. And in the case of the question from which we started this morning, you will only be able to make your methods truly adaptable to need if you can map the products and processes it contains to specific risks.

For example, I was recently involved in a simple project that required a standard rate table to be updated from time to time. The table fed the public website, so its potential impact was enormous, and in many organisations this alone would be enough to trigger the full-blown development lifecycle. Yet the risk was extremely tightly focused, and there as a single simple and quite fool-proof method of mitigating it – conduct a proper acceptance test before any change is allowed to go live. There was no merit in insisting on business or functional analysis, on a detailed design or a formal build process, and technical testing was completely trivial.

So triggering the full lifecycle would be stupid. Yet for many organisations it is the only option. No wonder so many developers and managers are so irritated by processes and methodologies!

The solution is simple. Most organisations have some kind of work classification tool or procedure for deciding how the standard processes should be applied. Many are based on pointlessly trivial issues, like the sheer size of the work involved, but even where there is a proper evaluation of the risks involved (e.g., novelty, organisational complexity, regulatory impact, and so on), there is no direct link to the specific products, procedures, verification methods, approvals and other things the work will have to include.

I have already given one simple example of what this might mean that most organisations could implement today. But our processes are seldom so little defined by the risks they control that it would take a considerable effort to unbundle all the different components ended to control specific threats. In other cases a single item effectively controls multiple risks and vice versa. Yet I am quite sure that a great deal of flexibility could be built into our methods, tools and standards that would make work much more risk-driven – and so much more intelligent and intelligible – than it is now.

Even if you can measure, maybe you still can’t manage

It has always been assumed that the use of metrics is one of the more convincing indicators that business management is approaching maturity. There is an alternative view, however, which is that measurement is used because there is some mileage in it, and it is easier than being serious about understanding management.

This is all encapsulated in the famous consultant’s dictum that if you can’t measure you can’t manage. This in turn seems to derive from a remark by Lord Kelvin:

When you can measure what you are talking about and can express it in numbers,
you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot
express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory
kind.

Now Lord Kelvin was one of the truly giant figures of science, so he probably shouldn’t be contradicted without good reason. But there is another figure, altogether more relevant to management and business in general and, unusually for that field, of equal standing even to Kelvin. This is John Maynard Keynes, who not only invented large chunks of twentieth century economics and shaped how the world worked for half a century but was also a great authority on statistical methods. So his opinion is certainly worth considering. And while his opinion does not contradict Kelvin’s, it certainly undermines quite a lot of modern business measurement programmes.

Am I right in thinking that ... the statistical method ... essentially
depends on ... having furnished, not merely a list of the significant causes,
which is correct so far as it goes, but a complete list? For example, suppose
three factors are taken into account, it is not enough that these should be in
fact verae causae [true causes]; there must be no other significant factor. If there
is a further factor, not taken account of, then the method is not able to
discover the relative quantitative importance of the first three. If so, this
means that the method is only applicable where [one] is able to
provide beforehand a correct and indubitably complete analysis of the
significant factors. The method is neither one of discovery nor of
criticism.

In other words, measurement is only valid where the underlying model of what you’re measuring is:

• Coherent.
• Consistent.
• Complete.
• Correct.
• Current.

… and probably a lot of other things beginning with ‘C’.

Now, I’d like to think that modern management and business systems were based on a clear conceptual framework, but my sense of humour is not quite so surreal. It is true that areas like manufacturing, logistics and mass commodities measurement is alive and very healthy, but I suspect that that is mostly because these areas are closer to technology than business. But as far as the day-to-day management of less mechanical things – such as people and projects - is concerned, it is simply contrary to the management culture of most companies to manage in the objective terms that measurement either assumes or supports.

I think I can honestly say that every people- or project-based company I have ever worked in was racked with opportunism, pragmatism (no, not a good thing, especially in this context) and the horizons of a whelk. In fact the entire history of management often seems to consist of one insight/revolution/fad after another.

This is completely anathema to the entire ethos of measurement, and the persistence of this attitude strongly implies that:

• We don’t really know how business and management work - otherwise we would not let consultants sell us a new toy every ten minutes.
• We don’t really care how business and management work - otherwise we have recognised how pointless much of what management does really is decades ago, anda come up with more intelligent models.
• The widespread introduction of measurement and metrics isn’t noticeably improving our understanding of either.

Certainly we are nowhere near the point where Kelvin’s advice (which was pretty weak on a few other things) can be sensibly applied.

But does it matter? Not much, as it happens. You only have to go back to the source of the ‘if you can’t measure you can’t manage’ philosophy to see why. Lord Kelvin was a physicist. He studied atoms. In particular he studied how things move and use energy when you bash them about. As I have argued elsewhere, as a model for anything except physics, physics fluctuates between the unhelpful and the disastrous, and other people who have taken Lord Kelvin’s a bit too seriously whilst he was banging on about non-physical matters seem to have come unstuck. Even Charles Darwin was seriously disturbed by Lord Kelvin’s ignorant but highly effective assault on evolutionary theory, which was based solely on a model of matter that left out radioactivity and which I have written about in more detail elsewhere. But this was a perfect example of perfectly accurate numbers leading to completely spurious conclusions because the underlying model was wrong.

But metrics are a limited (though not useless) basis for managing business for a different reason. As far as intelligent beings are concerned, metrics make sense only if you can assume that the basis on which they act is not changed by the fact of being measured. But we know from a dozen different sources that this is exactly what is not true about human beings. Indeed, it cannot be, for the simple reason that human beings are not atoms. Rather, as conscious beings, if they become aware that they are being watched, this fact alone is enough to create a new ‘factor’ in the ‘system’, and so to undermine the very assumption that the observers know what they are looking at!

Take, for example, the well-known Hawthorne Effect. Between 1924 and 1932, experiments observed workers’ performance as they changed various conditions – lighting, group incentives, and so on. They found that it was not the changes themselves that caused increases in performance so much as the workers’ consciousness that they were being watched (as demonstrated by the constantly changing conditions). In other words, measuring their performance changed their performance.

Hence another well-known phenomenon in business and management, which also tends to undermine measurement, namely the fact that people tend to manage so as to optimise what they are being measured on. Again, the Keynes effect – the system is changed by the fact of being measured.

Is this a problem for management? Yes – if you think that human beings are simply assets you buy and sell and will do as they are told in a completely mechanical manner. And in some businesses, perhaps what the organisation needs really are such drones. It must be a very crude, basic industry if it is.

Yet we should still celebrate the fact that human beings are never so lifeless that they can be expected to behave like things instead of people. For this simply ignores where the real ‘value’ in employing intelligent beings comes from – from their insight, their creativity, their enthusiasm, their combination of love of doing great things with the uniquely human quality of responsibility to do it properly.

When we can reduce that to numbers, we will be either gods or in big, big trouble.