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In some cases having a formalized process/methodology helps to appear professional and hide the fact that nobody knows exactly what they're doing. I've seen it it some place - very serious software dev company delivering very serious medical software, but in fact the whole team was just faking it and trying to keep up the professional image. The developers were random people without business domain knowledge, managers were managing the work without understanding it, analysts were producing some documents that nobody understood, customer approved some scopes hoping that the specification is actually what is needed (but in vain). The team was assembled from contractors, and people rotated quite frequently so that there was no chance for them to acquire the domain knowledge necessary to talk to the customer. It was just painful to take part in it, but took me some time before i realized in fact everyone is just pretending to understand what's going on. Endless approvals and multi-step procedures required for medical stuff just made the whole thing impossible to understand and smeared the responsibility so broadly that it was guaranteed there's no single person that knows too much.


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