When to skip procedures
Published by Esteban Glas on April 20th, 2007 | This post lacks all category except for: All this and that, Work
Recent events got me thinking on the matter of procedures and processes.
I usually respect and enforce procedures. As lead of a production team I must, processes are my allies, my best friends, they keep things from braking apart, avoid all production hell rolling on earth.
But…
There are times when they can’t possibly be observed, when timing is just toot tight (probably because procedures where overlooked in the first place) and you must send everything down the drain and just take action.
We’ve all read about and experienced call center’s procedural mazes and praised those unique individuals who were willing to take their eyes out of the scripts shown in the screen and go the extra mile to make a customer happy, many times overlooking their established processes.
Thus I ask: do you think it is necessary to stick to procedures at any cost or do you think there are occasions where they need to be overlooked?
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April 20th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
Esteban,
Rules are made to be broken. No set of proceedures, rules, or laws can encompass all possible manner of conditions that may arise.
I’ve struggled on both sides of this myself. When you arrive in a choatic situation and try to instill order, you think through what should happen, and build processes that you expect all to follow in a orderly fashion. In so doing, all benefit from the ‘engineering’ efforts you have applied to the situation - the process you have created that transforms inputs into predictable outputs.
On the other hand, as an actor within a set of processes, I’ve found that I have made conscious choices to change the process to favor a particular outcome, even though there is process breakage. For examle - years ago, I worked in tech support. For every call that came in, I was supposed to fill out an electronic case so that future analysis could be done on the nature of the calls and preventative action undertaken to reduce calls and prevent trouble for future customers. However, that took time, and when the number of people on hold began to really build up, I broke process and just focused on helping people and getting on to the next one, and didn’t doccument during those periods of time. The trade off I felt I made was for the greater good, at least in terms of those waiting to get help. Another point of view would say my actions slowed the ability to understand some of the problems and thusly more people would then experience them. You have to look at the benefits and consequences of what part of the process you are breaking and decide if, for the situation at hand, it’s the right thing to do.