Ask YC: The business process sweet spot
At company A, we had a process for everything. The joke was that to have the trash taken out you had to fill out a support ticket, wait a week, contact an escalation manager, negotiate a new priority and then if it was determined to be mission critical, you'd get your bin emptied in two weeks. Processes often got in the way of just getting stuff done. Often by the time you'd gotten an ok for a new project (even if you only needed two weeks to do it), it was 9 months later and you'd forgotten why you wanted to do it in the first place.
At company B, processes have evolved organically, and usually poorly. Time tracking is based around emailing around Excel spreadsheets and having an intern copy and paste them all into a bigger Excel spreadsheet so that an accountant can crunch the numbers. Projects and budgets are planned the same way. There are at least three different ticket systems, none of which are connected back to planning unless someone extracts the stuff ... and you guessed it, pastes it into a spreadsheet. Document management is just dropping stuff one of the dozens of SMB shares on the filer. We use AIM for communicating internally.
When looking at founding a company, it seems important to find the middle ground.
I'd like to provide some infrastructure -- we've already got a Jabber server, version control, and a wiki for basic document / idea organization. These, plus some simple groupware seem to be a given. I've debated playing around with open source CRM (SugarCRM) and ERP (Compiere or OpenBravo maybe). On one hand, I'm worried about going overboard, and slowing us down with overly rigid tools that don't really get all two of us anywhere. On the other hand, we're not planning on going full on until this summer and it seems like this is a good time to knock out mundane details. If things really heat up, it seems like it'd be really easy to drift into Company B-like patterns, because there wasn't the infrastructure or impetus to do things better, what with distractions like the company surviving and all.
What have been your experiences with seeing processes grow up from two man shops? Does it even make sense to be worrying about this stuff right now? If you don't mind, I'd be interested in your company size and age in responses.