Process commitment and communication

Process initiatives fail predictably. Not because the processes are wrong, not because the teams are incompetent, but because the gap between a documented process and a lived one is almost entirely a communication problem.

Most organizations approach process adoption backwards. They design the flowchart, get sign-off from management, run a training session, send an email, and then expect compliance. When compliance doesn’t follow, they escalate to enforcement—audits, checklists, QA teams functioning as process police. Compulsion feels like progress. It isn’t. It creates the illusion that the problem is solved while the underlying resistance remains untouched.

The question teams are really asking—even when they’re not asking it out loud—is simple: why should I do this? Not rhetorically. Concretely. How does this process benefit my project? What overhead does it add? Was that overhead minimized when it was designed? If the answer to those questions is “because it’s policy” or “it’s good practice,” you’ve already lost. People change behavior when they understand the benefit to themselves, not when they’re told benefits exist in the abstract.

What works is treating project teams as internal customers. That shift in framing changes everything. A customer needs to be convinced, not commanded. A customer has legitimate concerns that deserve real answers. When QA teams move from enforcement to mentorship—sharing concrete examples of how a process caught a defect, prevented a production incident, or saved measurable time—they become credible advocates rather than obstacles.

Visibility matters more than most teams acknowledge. A process that lives only in a wiki page or a PDF is a process that doesn’t exist in the daily experience of anyone doing the work. Posters, standups, team dashboards, whatever the medium—the process needs to be present in the environment where work happens, not filed somewhere and referenced only during audits.

And direct conversation beats mass communication. Every time. An email announcing a new process is easy to ignore. A conversation where someone explains the reasoning, answers objections, and listens to pushback is much harder to dismiss. The investment in that conversation is what makes adoption stick.

None of this is complicated. It’s just slower than issuing a mandate—which is why it gets skipped.