Quickie on Process Management

Current discussions of process management styles depict specific priorities in competition. Agile and other styles go a step further and attempt to privilege certain priorities, sometimes called values, over others. What effect does this value privileging have on actual work?

My guess? Not very much.

Let's assume that a certain set of priorities actually are in competition: For example, the more a worker invests in fine tuning the product's performance, the less he is able to fully document the requirements and changes. In our hypothetical process management style, we privilege product performance. One possible effect of explicitly emphasizing one priority over another is the exaggeration of pre-existing work habits. If Worker 1 has always authored weak documentation, now his documentation may all but disappear. If Worker 2 is learning his trade, he may not learn or develop a round skill set because he is coached to always direct his time and efforts in one direction.

Process management styles tend to assume all people are equal. They are not.

While adopting a process management system with explicitly emphasized values may have less impact on worker habits, it may play a large role in shaping the office culture. I would argue that an office culture can be viewed as a personnel filter. People seek out and thrive in certain settings. A worker whose habits and style are at odds with an office culture may become isolated, lose motivation, and then eventually quit or be fired.

I also wonder if this treatment of values is really all that different from how other, less self-conscious styles of process management deal with competing priorities. Might revisit this later.

Binx Bolling & Authenticity

Were you to accompany Binx Bolling to a movie, you'd be carted off to some out-of-the-way cinema. Once there, you'd witness his small talk with the cashier or the manager, him asking after their well-being and goings-on, and maybe his inquiring about the film itself. Not the movie: The actual reel of film. In short, you'd get a sort of show before the show. Bolling, protagonist of Walker Percy's 1961 book The Moviegoer, does all this in hopes of guaranteeing his own authenticity. He figures anyone can go see the 7 o'clock show. And being anyone is exactly what he wants to avoid.

Bolling differentiates his experience--and by extension, himself--by growing it from a simple routine act to one enmeshed in a variety of happenings. If he should he go to the 7 o'clock show, Bolling must learn that the reel of celluloid winding away overhead isn't just any old piece of celluloid, that the ticket-taker isn't just any ticket-taker. It seems anonymity is contagious.

This interested me, so I began to think of the result of living such a perspective. He can look back and relate a memory. And what is memory? The result of defining the Then from the Now. Then and Now: A duality fabricated or correctly perceived? At any given time either concept may be privileged: The good old days or Carpe Diem?

But are they really different? Isn't the event still happening? Why must it be happening immediately in front of you to be "happening"?