People or Process another Chicken and Egg?

What is more important People centric or Process centric?  And are these mutually exclusive?  Certainly people need to be involved in a Process but what they do and how/when they interact is scripted and for this reason a Process is not People centric.  Current day PLM tools are Process centric and therefore have limited the value that can be realized by any one person.  The Process centric approach has also limited the ability of PLM to move up stream in the design process (PLM is used in the last 10% of the development process and therefore there is a market opportunity defined by the remaining 90%).  If you simplify the development process into three segments – Design, Release and Manufacture you can say Design is People centric with Release and Manufacture being very Process centric.  Can a People centric solution be Process centric and can a Process centric tool be People centric?  Could we imagine deep in the labs of Twitter there is a group of people building a workflow add-in?  And what about Facebook, will we have workflow engines and configurators that we use to manage our friends?  Imagine a Facebook application that allows you to maintain people you dislike and if any of your friends friend one of your dislikes then they are defriended (actually not a bad idea!).  The new marketing platform of Social Product Development or Socially enabled PLM is tearing at the debate of People versus Process. 

People centric solutions improve our ability to connect and communicate to others within a “Context” that is interesting or important to us.  People centric must be evaluated from two fronts, first expansion of the people we might want to connect with (Discovery) and second improved connection (Communication).  With respect to time-to-market I struggle to see the value of Discovery.I know who is on my team and how they contribute – Do I or will I really be able to Discover people in my organization that will provide value to what I am doing?  On the flip side time-to-market can be improved through improved Communication - Keeping people on the same page is the number one issue or pain point within a product development project!  Sit in any team meeting and you will hear “I wish I knew you had done that” or some variation on this sentence.  There is just so much going on… and everything is so interconnected…  Parametric, Feature based and Associative CAD improved time-to-market by improving the way change is distributed across the geometric dimension of the product.  In its essence it reduced the need to communicate or automated the communication.

While it might never be clear what came first, it is clear that the egg is Process centric and the chicken is akin to People centric.  Like herding kittens, have you ever tried to force a chicken into a Process?  The only thing you have going for you is the herd mentality of a chicken or the fact the chicken will act stupidly (stupidly is now a learning phrase)… Like people the chicken is not interested in Process.  People like chickens do not want to become a cog in a machine, they want to think and act versus being scripted.  Going back to Design, Release and Manufacture I would challenge the objective of Release and Manufacture is to script these and the objective of design is to act and think.  So can a system that forces you into a script also be a system that improves your ability to think, act and communicate and hence your improve your time-to-market?