Process mental block
If you have a hammer in hand, everything that you see looks like a nail. There is a register for every fart, hiccup and cough. There is a document/form for every step. Most often these document formats clumsy, non-standard and never seen/heard off in the industry because someone who created these in first place was either smoking or just copied them from somewhere without due diligence.
For example, they want each code review comment to be entered into JIRA as a separate bug. Anyone with little knowledge of development would know how difficult it is. In the beginning of the projects, as we are discovering the right coding standards and guidelines, there would be quite a few review comments and eventually when everyone one the team is up to date with what is expected, the review comments would dies down to almost none. Majority of review comments are of improvement in nature and does not qualify as bugs.
Most importantly GIT already provides option to comment/track review comments. If the idea is to not lose track of things, these tools perfectly apt and around the world these are heavily used. But they wanted JIRA items so they can measure and quantify the improvement in quality with time. Its like plucking hair on eggs.
Anything can be done, provided you have unlimited time, energy and resources to do so. The CLIENTS who are paying for the projects NEVER ASKED FOR IT. Clients don't event know where their time is going off. Client wants minimal process, so they can focus on productivity, technology, gotomarket and the fracking offshore company wants to show-off value audition by fitting in a rigorous process, end of the day the employees are struggling through two different directions and goals. You can provide value add when you have additional time and resources on hand until then you have to take care of client expectations. If informed to client, it will be huge conflict so the leads never let the client know how much of process overhead they are taking.
The WHOLE EFFORT IN PROCESS IS COMING OF CLIENT BILLING WITHOUT HIS KNOWLEDGE. The team spends 3-4 hours sitting in monthly review meetings and another 1-2days preparing the data before the meeting and few hours each day logging/gathering data. While it is possible to add extra members to the team, the core members are knowledgeable and responsible for everything including technology, deliverables and the fracking process. So the team gets mentally harassed juggling through multiple goals and stuck between client deliverables and internal process
The FOCUS OF EMPLOYEES GOES AWAY from being tech savvy (leaning new technologies, taking new automation initiatives etc) , being more productive to taking care of nitty-gitty activities. Especially since there is a LOT OF FEAR IN EMPLOYEES to take care of local operations head, they compromise client expectations to meet local goals eventually leading to loss of projects. The loss of projects is used as a reason again to fit even stronger process leading to vicious spiral and continuous mental harassment to employees.
While they say the process can be customized and they blackmail the leads to not do so quoting that if you do so and the project gets into crisis, you will be screwed for deviation/customization of standard process. In fact it is done so often and so openly that none of the teams go for customization. The project managers and delivery head are sitting ducks as they cant mess with process team.
