Process Management Part – II
Fallacy No 5 – Nothing is being assumed.
Truth – No matter how hard you try – certain people will assume certain things and they will come to the fore only when they fail. Better just create a separate column “assumptions” in your document. Where people are asked to fill in that why they are assuming a certain change will work correctly or why a certain change will not impact other objects in the system. And make sure to have a subsection for
“General Assumptions” ( often known as the gut feeling 
).
Fallacy No 6 – People will communicate
Truth – Even if all the teammates are friends I doubt they will communicate. This is the best you can do if you think you can’t correct the above points. Just ensure people are communicating in the professional way. Whatever work related discussions they make have to be recorded no matter what. The recordings can be informal pieces of junk cluttered or some ill formatted files. But maintaining a record is paramount to make sure we are not missing out anything. One can say this is additional burden to the documentation stuff. But going by the standard literature of software engineering they have clearly defined meeting notes to be recorded ( for all sorts of meetings ). For the intelligent ones I will say dairy notes more than suffice. The entire point is to encourage healthy discussions and then make sure there outcomes are preserved.
Fallacy No 7 – Appreciations are a easy judgment
Truth – If appreciations are coming for individuals from clients probably there are going to be fallouts sooner or later. If internally you are appreciating individuals for their work its fine. But if external appreciations are coming for individuals there are chinks in your armor. I am not talking about one odd situation am talking about the situation when external appreciations for individuals become routine. It’s a clear indication that the team is not one to the customer and also that the efforts are not collective. A blame or appreciation from a customer has to be directed at the team.
The other point is – appreciations come at no cost so if you act miserly towards giving them you will hurt yourself in the end.
Fallacy No 8 – Asking people to adapt to a support environment.
Truth – Leave a scope for people so that they can utilize their talents to develop things. Make it easy for them to develop. You never know they might create something which no one has created till now. But shutting the door upon them leaves little scope.
Fallacy No 9 – Concentrating on the process being right
Truth – I mean what can I say to this ? A fool’s perception is – whatever he does is going to be right. All this time you tell people about doing things the right way. But I believe it’s far more important to be aware of disaster management rather than the perfect Sunday. After all people observe you more carefully when you are committing mistakes and not when you are doing things correctly. Same applies here it’s important to know how to do a process correctly. But its important to fully understand and appreciate the steps to be followed in the event of a disaster. If you are aware of disaster management not only will you manage processes correctly but you may as well succeed in averting them. Destructive thinking and accepting Murphy’s Law and then chalking out a plan will always lead you in the right direction. Importantly tagging disaster management as a back out strategy to me sounds foolishness, if anything. In fact I don’t even want to waste my any thoughts describing the differences.
“Just think of it if you can manage disasters efficiently what wonder it can do for you and your customer”
I will try and continuously improvise on these findings as well as adding new ones…. But for now its …bye to the reader
