I spend my time between software development and management system development, and the similarities have never been clearer.

Business is about getting things done in a sustainable way. Improvement is almost always the name of the game. Computer science is all about solving problems with the fewest resources. Software engineering is the process by which software eventually achieves that goal. These things could not fit together much better.

Even the terminology matches. Operating systems procedures and processes match their management system counterparts definition. This was almost certainly adopted by the original operating systems developers as it was certainly their goal to apply software to business problems. The major distinction is that one executes via teams of people whereas the other on machines.

Formal Management Systems focus on establishing documented activities, defining how to change them, and determining how to evaluate them.

There are so many analogues to software engineering. The documentation system is the source control system (like git). The training system is the compilation and deployment processes (note: “training” computer systems is much more predictable). Complaint handling and CAPA are your bug tracking system, software internal audit is basically the regression test suites. The Top Management functions, choosing software process direction and evaluating the effectiveness, are handled by the Product Owner.

Formal Management System procedures could be treated as software, with some level of unit and regression testing. All of the lessons from the move to micro-services could be very quickly applied to management system processes including: error management, fault tolerance, and monitoring.

All of this is not to overlook the extra complexities of management systems where people are the primary executors. I just happen to be less familiar with those.