December 30, 2018.
I'm working on a presentation for the SFELC Summit 2019 on the topic of designing effective process. There is so much worth saying here that I initially had some trouble narrowing it down. I think the best piece I've written on this topic is Work the policy, not the exception, but hey, that's about policy not process.
Those are different, right?
Approaching the problem from a different perspective, I started to write down the most interesting examples I've worked on over the last year or two, and the first few things that came to mind were a structured approach to selecting project leads, introducing new roles like SRE or TPM, and nurturing an internal community of learning.
Selecting leads and introducing new roles both seem like process, but then deciding when to apply those processes seems like policy. However, running a learning community doesn't seem like either of those, I think it's instead a program. A fifteen minute presentation works better for communicating a focused idea than promulgating a unified theory, so I decided to define these concepts a bit:
These aren't innovative definitions, but they were quite helpful for me to tease apart the subject matter to narrow my talk onto something I can cover successfully in a quarter hour.