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alganet 7 months ago

A company with hundreds of engineers and anyone of them can overpromise on some random feature?

Sounds like a widespread communication issue.

bluGill 7 months ago | parent [-]

That is why we have processes - so people know what promises they can make.

Communication is hard - you can spend all day, every day in meetings and get nothing done and still fall behind in communication needed to make this large project work.

alganet 7 months ago | parent [-]

I've been there.

If it happens too much, then the process is not working. Do you agree? If it happens occasionally, then it's just variance.

If it is important to a team to know about this variance, then I could imagine someone would think of measuring it, temporarily, to understand the situation. But not turn the whole thing into a process.

I've been on teams that transformed every little mistake into a lesson, burdening the whole team with cargo cult processes. Things we did because "once upon a time....". That's not healthy. I'm not implying that's your case, just showing another perspective.

bluGill 7 months ago | parent [-]

Do not throw away process because bad and wrong processes exist. Anytime you have a process you need to have a process in place to review and modify the process as needed. You should reward people for successfully changing the process - enough that people don't feel like it is a wasted effort, but not so much people look for ways to change it just to get the reward.

The right process is very valuable. However I will fully agree that there is a lot of bad process out there that people are following because change is too hard (sometimes this is all in their head and change is easy if you would just try!)