Post date: Nov 5, 2013 6:49:33 PM
You wouldn't wear a parka in July would you? If you were in Antarctica, you would, because there at that time of year, it's winter... Plus, let's be clear - it's Antarctica, and the average temperatures, even at the height of Antarctic summer, don't get above zero. Your environment matters. A lot.
It matters when designing processes for your organization, as well. A good process must be aligned with four important features of your professional environment - the market into which you're selling your products, the nature of the products themselves, your organization, and the skills and abilities of the teams within it.
Let's look at market influences first. If my market is consumer-oriented, dominated by social media and moving at lightning speed, I don't want to wait for a traditional process to "get it right". I'm going to be putting my best agile practices into place and releasing every two weeks. On the other hand, if I'm releasing into a more static enterprise environment, I probably don't need frequent releases (in fact, my rather conservative IT customers are probably unhappy if they have a new version of the product more than once a year). As such, a traditional process with decent change control mechanisms might bring better results with less uncertainty on which features will be delivered.
It's the same with product alignment - a web-based product can have more frequent releases than one that needs to be updated on every client's system. The process for the first product should target a minimal time to release, whereas this factor is less important in the process used to develop the latter. The process for the second should take the essential difficulty of the upgrade process into account and, if possible, use this essential issue to its advantage (not that one shouldn't make the upgrade process as simple as possible in any case). If my product needs language translation, I probably (for cost reasons) don't want to have new features translated for each two-week release. I'd cut the releases to once each quarter (even if my internal releases were on a two-week cadence) and integrate a sprint/iteration/whatever to have the product translated, rechecked, and released.
Similarly, organization counts. If I have a company that boxes both time and features and that doesn't keep teams stable, my process should look different from one that boxes only time and has stable teams. If my marketing department needs a half a year to plan a product launch, it doesn't matter much if my team can release on two week's notice and my process should take this into account. It's the same with the skills and abilities of the team. An inexperienced team will need a lot more design and code reviews in its definition of done than an experienced team - maybe even more QA cycles. And your process needs to take this into account.
That being said, if your process isn't aligned with these four facets of your environment, it doesn't mean there's a total disaster brewing. A good team can make almost any process work (For varying values of "work". N.B.: The converse is not true - a bad team can make hash even if you have a good process in place). A poor match between environment and process usually just means that it will be more work to get the results you want (And who wants that?).
The other thing to realize is that any standardized process you put into place will vary in its alignment from release-to-release, product-to-product, team-to-team, etc. Markets change; products change; teams change. As such, one must be ready to adapt one's process. And, again, failure to do so won't necessarily bring disaster, just more work.
So, when putting a process into place consider carefully the four environmental attributes listed above - market, product, organization, and team. If you don't you might find yourself in a situation analogous to being at the bottom of the world in shorts, sandals, and a tee shirt. And nobody wants that.