At our Summit, we also discussed design processes. I did some research in how design processes work for designers. The brief summary is, that they are based on in ideas that were popular in the early 20th century: scientific positivism and industrial production. This hides essential, but messy aspects of design. So from the point of the cited research, design methods don’t help designers in their work and/or have a negative impact (since needed actions can not be take in a particular process step.)
On the other hand, looking at it from a management and coordination perspective it can make a lot of sense to have e.g. standardized handover formats one can get used to etc.
So I like to discuss about what do methods and step wise processes help with under the assumption that they don’t help the design per se (design in its narrow, traditional meaning as in interaction design, product design, graphic design)