Organizational Pathologies

This might be a good place to consider OrganizationalPathologies. The one that got this started was the kind of organization where the various domains or departments neither understand nor trust one another.

One common one in Marketing Driven Companies is where the marketeers imagine that WishingMakesItSo, that is -- all they have to do is ask for something and somehow the Engineering Wizards will bring it in on performance, on cost, and on time. If the Engineering Staff resists it must be because they are stupid or lazy.

I've actually encountered quite a lot of this in my 35 years in research and development. It tends to call for a lot of diplomacy on the part of the Engineering Staff. Since Engineers are usually not the most diplomatic types, tending to be blunt and confrontational when it comes to the area of their expertise, the expected outcome is not good. I recommend that Engineers in this situation find a new employer. There is no real future in a company where mutual respect doesn't exist. These also tend to be Theory-X companies with a Burn'em out and Toss'em out personnel philosophy. --RaySchneider

An OrganizationalPathology? I have encountered in numerous forms in large organizations is the SubsidizedServicesDepartment. -- EelcoRommes

Another good one is when everything in an organization appears to be a 'project' rather than a functional line-of-business activity. It amuses me to see IT department managers creating 'support projects' of one year duration because they can't think of any other way of managing IT support.

uh.... what's wrong with 1-year support projects? Sounds like a good idea from here.... - This is a variant of ZeroBasedBudgeting?, where everything has to be fully justified every year or so. Do the janitors have to create a Bathroom Cleaning 2007 Project, and then Bathroom Cleaning 2008 Project in another year. Neither should the IT department. If Accounts Payable needs a report weekly, why should support for it be restarted every year. A change to the A/P program suite of course can be and should be a project.

[Many organizations do nothing but projects. Not all programmers/IT professionals are involved in day-to-day system administration, etc.--the "operations" side of an IT department]

The study of OrganizationalPathologies is a rather well-defined field, frequenlty referred to as IndustrialSociology. See for example http://home.earthlink.net/~jdc24/sociology.htm.

CategoryAntiPattern