Death By Planning

DeathByPlanning Anti-Pattern:

Problem: A company has a star spangled Management, Design and Development Team with universal egos that want to prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that they know how to design, develop, code, test, document, implement and maintain an architecture. And like silk worms they go to work and produce, and produce, and produce, and produce, and produce... to the point that everyone forgets why they wandered into this swamp of production and planning.

Solution: Design Goals! If you don't know where the finish line is... how can you finish the race? - MikeAddison?

... Or, don't go to work - Danger

Variation of this AntiPattern: a company gathers the project management activity centrally in a organizational cell that is disconnected from the battle field of real projects, coding and QA issues. In their ivory tower, this cell is trying to solve the addition of all the constraints of all the teams involved in all the company IT projects... Huhu, quite an objective, isn't it? Each attempt ends up in a more complex plan that is a good way to show very complex dependencies to the end users but that remains again and again not applicable by the IT teams (because the list of parameters and constraints cannot be put in equations and automated at a corporate level). The plan building industry then generates its own processes and tools in order to be able each day to solve again the constraint matrix of all projects of the company.

The result is after a while a strange feeling of having a daily useless and meaningless global plan while the working teams are progressing based on simpler assumptions, based on gentlemen agreements.

This somehow seems related to AnalysisParalysis...

CategoryManagementAntiPattern CategoryAntiPattern