The Link: Organizational Culture and Development Process
In some companies, the faults of development process are treated as if they have nothing in common with the organizational culture. Under “development process” I mean all the technical what-need-to-get-done’s; organizational culture embraces the values and behaviors of people. Technical problems can be addressed with much less effort by means of having a streamlined organizational culture in place, and I’ll provide some examples and visuals to support this awareness.
No Connection
This is the extreme case. There are still organizations where things get done by the prescribed process guidelines only. The cultural component is denied any power, since usually such an organization is certified as compliant to some process. Every small thing that might happen is documented, and the employees are supposed to act as prescribed for a predefined set of cases. If there’s a deviation from the process, people would not know what to do. An illustrative example: someone who is not responsible for testing, spots a bug in the build that goes to production, and notifies no one, thinking: “I’m not responsible for that, so let it go as prescribed by the process”.
1x Intersection
The next case: a senior back-end developer proudly states that their team has produced an immaculate piece of code, and they don’t care if customers get a buggy product, because the QAs are accountable for their failure to spot bugs. This is apparently a cultural drawback, and some stakeholder who expects quite a different behavior from a senior developer would want to talk to them and to mend the cultural loophole. Such one-time stitch is supposed to “upgrade” the beliefs of this person to the understanding that it’s the work of the whole company that matters. Customers don’t care whether a code is brilliant or not. They need a working app, so it’s in the best interest of all to contribute to having better tests in place. This scenario is not as dire as having no connection between culture and process at all, but if too many people think along the same lines with this back-end developer, then too many custom “culture stitches” would be needed (which takes time and effort).
The Limitless Intersection
That’s the case when most people in the company share the same cultural values. The two previous examples were linear. In the first one, the human factor was simply discarded, in the second example, the human factor got into spotlight as a one-time fix. Now we’re adding the universe of people as a multi-dimensional space where the culture and process planes intersect to infinity. It’s as if the canvas that had to be hand-stitched comes for granted. Once the same cultural values are shared by many people in an organization, there’s no need to apply custom efforts, as would be the case with prescribing steps for each action.
This story has been re-written from one of my earlier articles.
