Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior (Dorset House eBooks)

The journalist does not feel guilty for not having prevented the crash. That was someone else’s job.

9. Management By Mood Ring1

From Day One, the project has no chance of meeting its goals; most people on the project know this and say nothing.

They believe in the value of iteration.

The cult of “on hold.”

One of my clients was receiving project requests from more than one hundred different sources. Each of the requests was in a different form and level of detail, but none gave a coherent picture of what the requestor was trying to achieve.

7. Mañana Photo by Mark Lisao (markldxb@gmail.com) We all have windows of time within which we recognize that we need to start moving and keep moving to complete some work. Delivery dates beyond those windows create no sense of urgency, and therefore little motivation to act.

But the root cause of the endless huddle is the team’s leader. Team members who disagree with a decision will appeal it just as long as the leader tolerates it. It is up to the leader to know when to break the huddle and to have the courage to do it.

What did the few contentious meetings over the past year all have in common? Well, they were most often the ones that the boss’s boss attended, usually near the end of a quarter. In the worst meetings, the team reported a slip in the schedule. You form this into a statement of the pattern: “My boss tends to be extremely cranky about slip reported a