Software Process Management Blog #5

 For my 5th Software Process Management blog, I reviewed “There’s got to be a better way: your guide to process improvement” by Lauren Moon

This blog post on process improvement frames process work as a disciplined, iterative activity that blends feedback, metrics, and small experiments to make teams more effective. The post defines process improvement as intentionally evaluating workflows and tools, collecting feedback from stakeholders, and running incremental changes (experiments) to remove friction and increase value delivery. It surveys concrete tactics, mapping workflows, identifying pain points, prioritizing improvements that unblock flow, and measuring outcomes, and shows how familiar Agile practices (retrospectives, small batch sizes, and continuous feedback) fit into a larger process-improvement lifecycle. The article stresses that process improvement is not a one-time audit but a cultural habit: document existing flows, try minimally invasive changes, measure results, and iterate. It also provides practical templates and checkpoints managers can use to run an improvement cycle without top-down overhaul, and highlights collaboration between product, engineering, and operations as key to durable change. The tone is pragmatic. It focuses on high-impact, low-cost experiments first, keeps stakeholders involved, and uses objective metrics to avoid political debates about “how we always did things.”

I chose this blog because I think it’s useful to software process managers since it translates abstract process theory into an operational playbook that’s easy to roll out across teams. I think Software Process Managers frequently struggle with two competing risks: making too many changes at once (causing disruption) or doing nothing (letting inefficiencies persist). The blog’s emphasis on small experiments and measurable outcomes provides a pragmatic middle path: run short interventions (e.g., tweak your sprint planning cadence, or simplify a release checklist), measure their impact on cycle time or error rates, and only scale what works. This reduces political friction because change is evidence-based, not anecdote-driven. For process managers responsible for cross-team coordination, the blog’s guidance on mapping end-to-end workflows and involving dependent teams helps reveal systemic bottlenecks (handoffs, approvals, environment provisioning) rather than blaming individual teams. The post also supplies ready-to-use artifacts, process maps, experiment templates, and metric suggestions, that shorten the time from diagnosis to action. In short, it equips managers with a repeatable, low-risk approach to incremental process improvement that improves predictability and morale while minimizing disruption, exactly the outcomes software process managers are measured on.

https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/why-process-improvement-matters-for-your-team