[jjk166]

> On the other hand, I have seen process stifle above average people or so called “rockstars”. The thing is, the bigger your reliance on process, the more you need these people to swoop in and fill in the cracks, save the day when things go horribly wrong, and otherwise be the glue that keeps things running (or perhaps oil for the machine is more apt).

This is a case of bad process. No process is perfect, but the whole point of process is so when things go wrong they don't go horribly wrong, and that you don't need rockstars to fill in the cracks. It should be making your rockstars faster because the stuff they need others to take care of gets done well. Unnecessary friction that slows people down is generally a sign of management mistaking paperwork for process.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Very often paperwork is the necessary process. I’ve seen multiple engineering teams who used to accept essentially any customer escalation, for example, until they found themselves essentially being DDoSed by poorly explained tickets filed at much too high of a priority. Now they have forms that customer-facing folks have to fill out explaining in detail what’s going wrong, why an escalation is required, and naming the senior person who’s accountable for the accuracy of that form.

Is it slow and annoying to jump through these hoops? Without a doubt! I’ve also seen people on the other side of the process who are very frustrated that they can’t just escalate when they know devs would want to hear about it. But it’s not acceptable for people to get woken up every week because the new support engineer filed a customer error as a global outage, and smart people tried and failed to put a stop through it through training. I don’t know what the alternative could be.

[jjk166]

Paperwork is a tool, not a process. Maybe the right process does involve paperwork, maybe it doesn't. Further, even if the right process involves paperwork, it doesn't mean that adding more paperwork has improved the process.

And it's important to note that our opinions on what is slow are often biased by our time with poor process where things seemed to be getting done quickly because they weren't being done properly. You can cook chicken in a fraction of the time if you don't check whether or not it's reached temperature; a process that prevents salmonella is slower, but it's not slow.

Your example is a case of shifting from bad paperwork to better paperwork. Tickets were being filled out, but not with the required information and the wrong people were labelling things poorly. The newer process involves information that should most definitely be recorded on a good ticket. People might complain about having to go through the process, but is there any actual evidence that it has introduced excessive delay to legitimate high priority tickets? My guess would be that actual high priority tickets are the ones you most want a detailed explanation of what's going on, and the ones that should be immediately reviewed by a senior person to verify accuracy.