> I certainly think [...] that the quality of your staff is more important than your process.
I don't think those are independent variables.
In my experience, one of the properties of a good development team is that if a project lacks clear guidelines so the developers can work effectively together, the team will naturally tend to self-organise. They will establish enough ground rules among themselves to collaborate effectively, and they will adopt or create any tools necessary to support that basic process. A good team that does already have a decent process and competent leadership will still naturally review and update that process over time based on their experiences using it.
This also explains why one or two substandard developers on an otherwise competent team are so damaging: they are sufficient to disrupt any reasonable attempt at self-organisation, and the team now requires strong leadership rather than merely collaboration among peers. Unless the leader is capable of both instilling discpline in the rogue elements and simultaneously accepting and promoting good ideas from the remainder of the group, which is a very difficult thing to do even for an experienced manager with good intentions, the result will still be lower performance than a team without the negative elements.
I don't think those are independent variables.
In my experience, one of the properties of a good development team is that if a project lacks clear guidelines so the developers can work effectively together, the team will naturally tend to self-organise. They will establish enough ground rules among themselves to collaborate effectively, and they will adopt or create any tools necessary to support that basic process. A good team that does already have a decent process and competent leadership will still naturally review and update that process over time based on their experiences using it.
This also explains why one or two substandard developers on an otherwise competent team are so damaging: they are sufficient to disrupt any reasonable attempt at self-organisation, and the team now requires strong leadership rather than merely collaboration among peers. Unless the leader is capable of both instilling discpline in the rogue elements and simultaneously accepting and promoting good ideas from the remainder of the group, which is a very difficult thing to do even for an experienced manager with good intentions, the result will still be lower performance than a team without the negative elements.