Lighten Your Process Burden
7 Dec 2024
Everyone hates oppressive processes, but somehow we keep managing to create them.
Process should add value, not prevent it. Lightweight processes can drive a business forward. But when policies are layered on top of each other, it leads to a bureaucratic bulk that’s a drag on productivity.
No one intends to build a cumbersome bureaucracy. Policies are a response to corporate trauma. A Bad Thing happens. You create a system to prevent that problem. At some point, more Bad Things happen and your new system didn’t stop them. You react to the trauma with more policies.
Over time, your process becomes complicated. It slows productivity. It prevents real work from happening. To fix it you add more processes to make sure work happens. Things slow down more. But somehow, Bad Things still happen.
When your process consumes more time than the value it creates, you have a bureaucracy.
At one company, preparing for quarterly planning meetings consumed a month of each quarter. What began as a one-day process to track investments within a year ballooned into a bureaucratic slog. Every new stakeholder added layers of complexity.
This is how well-meaning policies spiral out of control, choking productivity across an organization. You can see this happening in your own companies. Cycle times slow, dependencies drop, and quality falls. These aren’t isolated problems. They’re signs your policies are dragging you down. Adding more won’t solve them.
Attempts to streamline your policies rarely work. You’ll never cut deep enough. Every suggested cut is an item that’s essential to someone, and they’ll defend it rigorously. In the end, you only make minor adjustments.
When cuts don’t work, it’s time for a more radical 'zero-based process' approach. Start with a clean slate. Instead of tweaks and cuts, rebuild from scratch. Create new policies as the need arises. This reset will stop overgrowth before it starts.
If you find that your organization builds toward bureaucracy very fast, you can make this reset a normal part of doing business. Regularly make radical changes so you don’t get stuck in any particular way of doing things.
In the quarterly planning example above, the company could revamp their methods every quarter. Instead of presenting detailed spreadsheets of all their planned tasks, they could focus on major themes. A future quarter might consist only of showing prototypes or mockups. By doing something differently every quarter, the process never builds up before it’s thrown out.
The more entrenched your process is, the more resistance you’ll get to cuts. Moving to a zero-based process might cause an all-out fight. Bureaucracies are great at one thing: growing themselves. They fight hard to survive. There may be people whose entire jobs rely on the red tape.
You’ll hear serious, scary reasons why you can’t change. People will tell you why legal, compliance, security, and the auditors won’t let you change. In every case, they’re wrong. These groups never mandate a specific process. But the bureaucracy loves to invoke these groups as reasons to avoid change. Sometimes it’s because someone is afraid. Other times, they’re using fear as a weapon.
People fear change. They worry constant process tweaks will mean more work. That Bad Things will slip through.
But Bad Things are already happening despite your policies. Extra work? Your bloated process means any change is an improvement. That month-long effort for quarterly planning consumed the entire engineering organization. Cutting the effort in half would have saved eight weeks every year. Who couldn’t use two additional months of work from your whole product development division? Eliminating drag will boost productivity far more than the extra effort.
Preventing that bloat can transform your company, making everything run faster. Processes should serve your goals. Not the other way around. Take control, cut ruthlessly, reset often, and focus on what matters. Does your process help—or hurt?