Fri, 11 Jul 2014 10:03:56
In a nutshell, there are two major approaches to controlling any process. The ‘defined’ process control model requires that every piece of work be completely understood. Give a well-defined set of inputs, the same outputs are generated every time. A defined process can be started and run until completion, with the same results every time. Tunde said the methodologies that I showed him attempted to use the defined model, but none of the processes or tasks were defined in enough detail to provide repeatability and predictability.
Tunde said my business was an intellectually intensive business that required too much thinking and creativity to be a good candidate for the defined approach. He theorised that my industry’s application of the defined methodologies must have resulted in a lot of surprises, loss of control, and incomplete or just wrong products. He was particularly amused that the tasks were linked together with dependencies, as though they could predictably start and finish just like a well-defined industrial process.