In a performance culture, measurement matters a LOT. Hitting targets matters a LOT.
In a performance culture that’s moving fast, there’s a part of creating results that can easily get lost/dropped/forgotten – process evaluation.
So while maintaining an outcome focus, how does a team focus on process evaluation at the minimum effective dosage?
And what about when a process spans multiple teams? That’s some next level shit.
So let’s unpack:
- Process evaluation is assumed to be necessary to create the most optimal path to company growth. Without any sort of evaluation on how work is done, a business can definitely still prosper, but it’s likely with a million sub-optimal workflows in place – so it’d be succeeding somewhat against the odds, and probably to a lesser degree than would be possible with better process eval.
- There’s an assumption that there’s an optimal range for how much time to spend on process evaluation. If there’s 0 evaluation, there’s 0 adaptation and improvement, so 0 is outside the optimal range. As soon as there’s even a tiny bit of eval, it’s likely to cause some change, so we’re at least on the spectrum. It might make sense to think of process eval as either a logistic function, slow to start, super effective in the middle, and with strongly diminishing returns at a certain amount of invested time. However, it’s also entirely possible that the function is more aggressive at lower x-axis values – still having an asymptotic return at high x-values but garnering extremely high ROI as the first low hanging fruits are picked.
- It’s also assumed that process eval is harder when a process spans multiple teams.
- More teams = more people = more viewpoints about what the SoP actually is
- Distinct teams can and will have distinct SoPs which means merging multiple processes is necessary to understand the full context and work holistically.
All of this is way harder than just saying “did it work”, and then doing more of the same, or something completely different based on the answer.
“Why did this work?” is a really hard question to answer, but comparatively it’s far more rewarding in the long term than flinging spaghetti.