There is a persistent and rather frustrating myth in our industry, that processes are the enemy of speed. As if governance, guardrails, and due diligence exist merely to irritate engineers and block delivery. This belief is not only incorrect, it is dangerous. It erodes trust, encourages shortcuts, and ultimately deteriorates stakeholder experience, while increasing risk and avoidable cost.
When I came across the statement,
The initial assessment stated that the project was relatively small and therefore a suitable candidate for a rewrite, it immediately triggered this journal entry. If we had engineered the solution correctly the first time, we would not be in a rewrite situation at all. It is evidence of inadequate engineering discipline in the original build - with disregard to our guardrails.
Let me be clear. Policies and governance are non‑negotiable for a reason. They exist to prevent us from repeating past mistakes, to ensure that we deliver secure, stable, and compliant solutions, and to uphold the trust placed in us by our organisation and the public we serve. Guardrails often get an unfair reputation. Yet they are precisely what their name implies: guidance to cross the bridge safely, not a barrier preventing forward motion. If someone chooses to leap over the railing and plummet into the abyss, that is not the fault of the guardrail. It is a deliberate choice to ignore sound engineering discipline.
Many of these policies, governance practices, and guardrails were created reactively, a direct response to quality issues, production incidents, technology debt, and unsustainable engineering workarounds. Had we remained firmly grounded in SOLID engineering, we would likely have required far fewer controls. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is ours to own.
Processes are not the enemy.
In fact, processes validate quality and reinforce engineering principles. When we design solutions consistently, when we standardise our approaches, when we choose simplicity and security by default, these processes become nearly invisible. They integrate seamlessly into our workflows and feel less like checkpoints and more like natural extensions of good engineering.
This is precisely why our self‑service capabilities encourage alignment with our pillars of consistency, standardisation, security, and simplicity. Our v2 blueprints, showcased in our AzureDevOps.Automation.Pipeline.Templates.v2 open-source project and CI/CD cookbook, are designed to create scalable, reliable CI/CD pipelines that carry vast amounts of automation. That automation abstracts the processes so effectively that developers barely notice them. This is where maturity lies.
Let me emphasise this again: It is not the processes that slow us down. It is our bad engineering practices, our Band‑Aid solutions, and our accumulated technical debt. These are the true culprits. They introduce uncertainty, rework, fragility, and operational noise. Processes simply reveal this reality; they do not create it.
With the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence, our policies, governance, and guardrails are becoming even more essential.
They are already being embedded directly into instruction files and agent behaviour. Why would we trust an artificial agent more than a human? Why would we apply different expectations or hold different standards? The answer is that we cannot and we must not.
Once we establish trust, across teams, in our practices, and in our automation, we can abstract and hide most of our processes behind engineering excellence. But we cannot remove them entirely. Due diligence is not optional when we serve the public. It is part of our social and organisational contract.
In the end, disciplined engineering accelerates us. Processes illuminate our path, maintain safety, and ensure that we deliver value without compromising on security or quality. They safeguard stakeholder experience, reduce risk, and avoid the hidden costs that arise when we rush and cut corners.
Processes do not slow us down. Poor engineering does.
Enjoy your favourite brew. I will savour my hot chocolate and raise it to disciplined engineering, sound judgement, and value‑driven progress.