I was an engineering manager for 25 years, and had to deal with the balance. I worked for a heavily process-driven company. It could be infuriating, but they did manage to consistently produce some of the finest hardware in the world (unfortunately, the same could not be said for the software).
I have found that writing things down, can ossify a project, but you really can't do without. Communication overhead is the single biggest killer. That's why a small team of experienced engineers, that are used to working together, can often do amazing amounts of work, and that "tribal knowledge" -that bugaboo of software process gurus- is actually a very important accelerator.
I wrote a post called "Concrete Galoshes"[0], that talks about the things that add structure and inflexibility to projects.
The single biggest lesson, is that we should be very careful about "One Size Fits All" solutions. Different types of projects need different types of overhead and structure.
I was an engineering manager for 25 years, and had to deal with the balance. I worked for a heavily process-driven company. It could be infuriating, but they did manage to consistently produce some of the finest hardware in the world (unfortunately, the same could not be said for the software).
I have found that writing things down, can ossify a project, but you really can't do without. Communication overhead is the single biggest killer. That's why a small team of experienced engineers, that are used to working together, can often do amazing amounts of work, and that "tribal knowledge" -that bugaboo of software process gurus- is actually a very important accelerator.
I wrote a post called "Concrete Galoshes"[0], that talks about the things that add structure and inflexibility to projects.
The single biggest lesson, is that we should be very careful about "One Size Fits All" solutions. Different types of projects need different types of overhead and structure.
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/various/concrete-galoshes/