Something has always troubled me.
Despite being a "process guy", in many ways, I hate following the rules.
When my wife and I both worked in healthcare, it used to drive her secretary nuts that I wouldn't park where I was supposed to. I rarely like being the guy who simply "does what he's told" - unless it's my wife who's doing the telling!
But isn't that what creating process discipline is all about? Figuring out the optimal way of doing something and then repeating it forever and ever?
I'd argue that it's not. There is a danger in optimization in that we can get so hung up on "optimizing" that we lose sight of what we're really after. Seth Godin had a recent blog post that speaks to this very issue. In the "non-optimized life" he makes the case that we should all be less focused on optimization and more focused on creation. It's interesting and instructive from an IT perspective.
Clearly, as Service Management professionals, one of our key objectives is to identify process inefficiencies and eliminate them. We need to take out the junk that keeps us from doing the job of IT well. The problem is that we sometimes get so hung up on "optimizing" that we forget that our goal is to do the job of IT better. Sometimes that will happen from optimization. But a lot of times it will come from a little bit of controlled chaos that creates a better way of doing something. It also means that we need to be building into our processes the flexibility to let our team members be professionals and use their judgment to create better outcomes.
So we need to be careful that we don't optimize or improve for the sake of improvement and always ask ourselves what we need to do to provide value and do our job better. And if our process is getting in the way of doing just that - then un-optimize it and get it done.
Because not everything should be controlled.
And sometimes you need to break the rules to do the job of IT better.
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