Why do you need a capital-P Process? Does it need to have a name?
Best teams I've been on have been self-organizing, with a few senior engineers who did heavy-lifting and some less experienced engineers learning new stuff. Management was minimal (the more we had, the more things sucked).
- Minimize management. Minimize management. Minimize management. Management exists to set very high level directions and to remove obstacles.
- Make sure that different teams talk. A lot.
- Get real. Don't blow smoke up people's asses. Making a schedule with a granularity of a day on a six month project is fucking bullshit. Just stop it, okay? You might be able to do this a week out, but not much more than that. If that deadline is important, be clear on why. (I've been on projects that have been absolutely killed because someone felt they had to ship on magic date X, when shipping a few months later would have saved the product).
- If you are working steady 60+ hour weeks, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing regular 80+ hour weeks then you will burn out and leave.
Ha. Ever have a client? "Dear Enterprise Customer, We'll get it done when it's done. Cool? Can we have the gig?" Yeah no. That's not at all how the world works.
We have process because we have deadlines, commitments, responsibilities... and there needs to be an easy way for people to come and go inside of an organization without having to invent the wheel each time.
Best teams I've been on have been self-organizing, with a few senior engineers who did heavy-lifting and some less experienced engineers learning new stuff. Management was minimal (the more we had, the more things sucked).
- Minimize management. Minimize management. Minimize management. Management exists to set very high level directions and to remove obstacles.
- Make sure that different teams talk. A lot.
- Get real. Don't blow smoke up people's asses. Making a schedule with a granularity of a day on a six month project is fucking bullshit. Just stop it, okay? You might be able to do this a week out, but not much more than that. If that deadline is important, be clear on why. (I've been on projects that have been absolutely killed because someone felt they had to ship on magic date X, when shipping a few months later would have saved the product).
- If you are working steady 60+ hour weeks, you are doing it wrong. If you are doing regular 80+ hour weeks then you will burn out and leave.
- It's done when it's done. Ship it, and iterate.