Working at a large company, one of the first thoughts to enter many people’s mind is bureaucracy. Many people consider bureacracy as inherently bad, the term is often used in a negative way. I had a friend who said basically if you aren’t doing something every day that could get you fired, you aren’t taking enough risk. Although it is good to challenge the organization so that it ends up doing the right thing, that quote is a bit extreme for me especially for organizations that are stable. And implied in it is that you ought to always be pushing against the bureaucracy. You’ll find that you can burn a lot of physical and emotional energy if you are always pushing against the bureaucracy and view everyone else as a bunch of idiots. That isn’t healthy for your employer, your project, or yourself. If you are always pushing against the bureaucracy, that is a sign that something is wrong – it might be your organization, or it might be you.

Bureaucracy isn’t always bad. There are places where bureacracy can have positive effects. Rules and processes exist for a good reason: they help the organization to scale, and frankly they help to prevent problems that have occurred in the past so they aren’t repeated. Bureaucracy also needs to be balanced such that there isn’t so much of it that it removes the opportunity for personal judgement. There are places where it gets out of balance, but don’t assume that mere presence implies out-of-balance. On the flip side, we tend to be naive about how complex the world really is. Although simple is good, we shouldn’t oversimplify it to the point that we make poor decisions.

Large processes in an organization are often segmented into smaller processes which are carried out by individuals. So one of the side effects of a bureacracy is that certain people have responsibilty for parts of an organization’s process. If you can figure out who owns which part of the process, (this is the good part:) you can get the organization or those owners to do the process for you. Basically you can get other people to do things to help your project.

Here are some examples of that:

  • Write the product documentation all by yourself (most programmers are poor writers) vs. a trained Information Development staffer (technical writer) writes the documentation for you.
  • Be aware of and install all the patches for your operating system and application, do backups, manage licenses, etc. vs. use the servers provided by the I/T department.
  • Get sued vs. work with your organization’s lawyers to maintain intellectual property protection.

Now the part that many people have a difficult time swallowing is that the process usually needs to be done the way that the owner wants, not the way you want. That is probably because the owner has a lot of experience and knowledge for that process and has figured out how to minimize risk for that process, whereas if you were doing it you would want to minimize the effort instead of the risk. As I’ve mentioned before, there is a cost for everything. In this case the cost for someone else doing the process for you is that it needs to be done their way. And I’m going to propose that in most cases that cost is worth it. Get the bureacracy to work for you. Use your organization as an asset, not a liability. The cost may be some lost flexibility, but if in the end you get more done that applies the experience of experts, that is probably a cost worth paying.