Again, both the process and the plan should be viewed as guides and adjusted as the work progresses. In this case, the plan is the map and the actual work is the terrain. Processes also make little sense for tasks that you will only do once. While you should make a project plan, it would not pay to define a process. When you expect to do similar tasks several times, however, the cost of defining the process can be recovered over several projects.
Programmers often feel that their work is entirely creative.
They think of every program as unique and don't believe that a defined process could possibly help them. While software engineering is creative work, it is not black magic. Most of the jobs we do are much like others that have been done before. As long as we view each job as new and unique, we will continue to make the same mistakes that thousands of others have made before us. While the details of each job will differ, many of the steps on every software project are similar to tasks you and many others have done before.