Processes, Work and Collab
This page explains how this library fits with Agent Collab and Agent Work Patterns, and why a process is a different kind of document from a work pattern.
where this sits
How this fits with the other two libraries
Agent Collab covers what happens inside one room: who may speak, who holds the pen, and what the record is. Agent Work Patterns covers the shape of a whole job: the phases, what crosses between them, and what happens when a phase fails. Its patterns are reusable, and they belong to nobody.
This library covers your organization's own work. A process names work patterns and collaboration patterns for its phases, and adds what only you can supply: your trigger, your systems, your legal gate, your owner. Processes refer to patterns, and the patterns never refer back, which is how the rest of the family works too.
Why a process is not a work pattern
A work pattern is generic. Train and certify is the same shape at your company and at your competitor, which is why there are only a few of them and why one earns its place by recurring across organizations.
A process is yours. It has your brand rules in it, your compliance gate, your systems, and a person's name on it. A department usually has somewhere between ten and forty of them. You would never have forty work patterns.
They also last different lengths of time. You pick up a work pattern when you need it and put it down again. A process is a standing document: it gets amended a few times a year, runs hundreds of times, and outlives everyone who wrote it. That is why it carries a version, an owner, an effective date and an amendment history, and why every run records which version it ran under.
A process is the document. A run is one execution of it. Both need records. If you keep them separate, an auditor looking at a run from last March can read it against the version of the process that was in force in March, instead of the version you have today.