This situation fairly represents the common known phenomenon: one has an idea, needs people to make it come true, initiates, plans and executes everything, and in the end… it turns out that nothing is working the way it should. Practice vs. theory.

If you ever worked in a team you probably realized soon enough: processes are good and nice and useful, but they cannot account for what actually happens in reality. Still, organizations need them to have something to adhere to, newbies need them to see the basics of the workflow, but here comes the classical expectations vs. reality-situation. Expectation is naturally smooth business operation, and reality is that there are people working on a task/project with different backgrounds, different ways of thinking, all in all: different minds. And given different minds, what they remember and forget is different. At every single member of a team. The result? Chaos. The bigger the team is, the bigger the chaos becomes.

What could be the solution for this issue? We may all agree that a successful business has to have (more or less) strict guidelines – or guidelines, at least, even if there are different people working in it. But in the same time we also have to admit: being too strict with processes can result in many undesired impacts. For example: the members of the team become less motivated being unable to share their ideas concerning process improvements, they might start feeling like robots not being allowed to add the values deriving from their personality and creativity, and so on. Clearly, the solution has to be something in between these extremes.

The guidelines and processes are definitely needed to keep the workflow going, to keep it transparent and controllable – and measurable as well. Therefore, what a successful business needs is a system that keeps the work itself between concrete boundaries, and… and nothing more. That is what we based Babelprojekt on. Creativity cannot cost missing the deadlines, but keeping the deadlines cannot cost the loss of creativity. A project management system that is working sufficiently, will not let any of these happen. It will reduce the stress of the team members (which can also obstruct creativity!) by keeping the deadlines transparent – not letting any negative surprises to happen – , while it does not put too much control and pressure on the people. What we invented here is not something no one ever knew. Aristotle was the one inventing the expression of the golden mean…