Follow the process?
I have been making my living for the last 20+ years following processes. Unfortunately, I have not seen that processes have been maintained, evaluated, and evolved as they should be. My theory is this: no one collects any metrics anymore, so no one knows how well their processes really work.
There are two adages that I believe apply:
You cannot manage what you do not measure.
What gets measured, gets done.
All too often, processes go stale or drift so far from their intent that it becomes a disadvantage to be process-driven. If you work for such a company or even if you have your own personal processes, consider putting into place a layer where you measure parts of the process. I don’t know what those measurements would concern, just start measuring something.
Once you have a reasonable set of data points, attempt to perform some analysis to see if you can draw any conclusions. At a company I worked for in the past, we measured the effectiveness of peer reviews by tabulating documentation defects and code defects detected by the group and by person. In a separate activity, we measured defects detected by our QA group and ultimately by the customer community. My point being, we could take all this data and eventually determine our effectiveness and even predict our future performance. Being able to predict our performance enabled us to estimate and plan much better and thus be more competitive.
If you are a company that suffers from this, you need to swallow the Red Pill and see the truth. Measured and analyzed processes can become your Morpheus. If you swallow the Blue Pill, you will almost certainly continue to languish within old, non-value-added processes that lead you into an uncertain future.
You should now be conjuring up an image of Laurence Fishburne gesturing you to come and get some.