At the office, I’m known as “the process guy.” Holy hell do I dislike that moniker.
“Hey everyone, here comes Justin. He’s a pedantic little nerd and he’s gonna point to some shitty flowchart he made and tell you that you’re not doing your job right. We call him the Process Guy.”
Urgh, I hate it so much.
But, uh, they aren’t… they aren’t totally wrong. I do love a good flowchart…
Look, it’s hard to be someone that thinks in rulesets and dependencies and also sit with the cool kids at lunch. Many wonderful creators and collaborators view capital-p Process with disdain, so rather than let it become a four-letter word, let’s try to make it a three-lane highway.
The Process Highway
On the interstate you’ve got a lane for exiting, a lane for cruising, and a lane for passing. You’re always going in the same direction and the destination never changes, but not every car has to move at exactly the same pace.
When crafting a workflow–for a singular project or an evergreen SOP–start with the gold-star set of actions that will have the highest opportunity for success. Consider your stakeholders, communication channels, checkpoints, redundancies, all of those little meticulous details that present themselves as dots and dashes on your Gantt chart. Bask in the glory of this foolproof plan you’ve crafted, and then accept that it will never, ever go that way in real life. Not even close, probably.
But this isn’t your first rodeo; you already know that things never go exactly as scripted. And because you know this, here is where real process planning can begin. Consider that first iteration to be your right-hand lane; it’s ideal for when time is on your side and things can run to the gameplan. But now look at each phase (milestone? sprint? work package? Man, it’s just an all-you-can-eat buffet of jargon with these things isn’t it?) look at each… chunk and begin catastrophizing in your head.
Being a Project Hypochondriac
Where could it all go sideways? What if the first round review goes horribly? What if we don’t have time to run it through proofing before the presentation? What if we don’t get the brief approved on time but still need to hit a hard launch date? Each of these what-ifs become simple lane shifts if your process is flexible enough to accommodate them. This is how we condense the round two timeline. This is the comment we prepend to our presentation stating that we’ll send along the proofed review deck later in the day. This is how we kick-off a team when elements of the brief aren’t 100% signed-off on. This is our process when we can’t follow our process.
A brilliantly designed workflow is not a linear series of if-then statements. It’s a web of best practices, contingencies, and parachutes to bail the team out. Conscientious preparation of tiny, corrective adjustments that take into consideration the unpredictable nature of our work and the people who perform it can communicate to the team that you saw this coming, and that you’ll keep ‘em on track.