03:Quality vs. Go Live

Friday, 30 July 2010

Having missed last week’s blog post, opting instead to soak up the sun on the beach with my family, I have had a difficult time this week coming up with a subject for today’s post. I thought I would talk about a nagging question that I have been pondering for a while now: Is Structure and Process really a good thing at all?

Let me explain: During my career I have worked with some varied companies. Starting out at a small computer hardware retailer, moving one of Biggest Banks in South Africa, then moving to a small software company (Staff of less than 30). After that I worked for a global consulting firm who used to sponsor tiger woods and the Williams formula 1 team. I then moved to the UK and worked for a well know price comparison site and current find myself again at a small software company of 100 staff members (although we have recently been acquired and thus now form part of about 400 staff members – but this is not yet in scope).

The larger organisations seem to have structure, process and guidelines when it comes to performing a task while the smaller companies tend to just run around in chaos fighting fires and doing what has to be done once it has become critical 3 days ago.

The thing is that many of the projects I worked on during my life with the larger organisations, often never saw the light of day (being cancelled by clients before they could go live) while all the smaller organisations had deployed and operating live systems.

Does that mean that it is actually better to have no structure and simply react when required?

I suppose the answer may lie in the economies of these companies. Both types are profitable. But the smaller companies that do not mature there processes remain small, and continue having smaller margins, while the other type grow from strength to strength and tackle projects orders of magnitude bigger, more complex and interesting (although they often never get delivered)… But then that could be a business strategy, I suppose.

As a cog in the engine of these companies, it’s nice to see your work go live, but I’m questioning the cost of spending your life in chaos and anguish for the (short lived) privilege.