Project Sabotage Patterns

There is the lady at my organization who is a master at sabotaging IT projects. She's a con artist. I'll call her "Connie". Why she is not working for some big company selling over-priced equipment to PointyHairedBosses using buzzwords and bull, I don't know. (Perhaps she is on the side, since she doesn't do much real work.)

The management turn-over is high enough that she is able to repeat the pattern and get away with it each time. She's yet to be promoted because she's otherwise incompetent. She seems to enjoy tossing monkey wrenches into the works more so than she wants a promotion. (She wants both, but mucking seems a priority.)

The pattern usually works as follows. The project is typically given mediocre or minimal funding and thus there will be trade-offs. Those in the industry expect such with limited resources. However, naive PointyHairedBosses (PHB) often don't. So Connie cozies up to the new PHB in town and acts all concerned about his/her family, back problems, etc.

She pretty much ignores the new project until it's just about ready to be released, at which point she produces a list of all the short-comings for the PHB, who is then overwhelmed and surprised, and cancels the project. She then proposes some BS buzzword that will magically fix it all, and claims the project would go well if she was in charge. (She fouls up projects she's in charge of also, blaming others. Some suspect she deletes files and corrupts the source code.)

I've proposed better up-front documentation in order to clarify the trade-offs, etc., but for some reason she's sabotaged that also. (I don't know how, it's behind closed doors. I suspect she claims planning is an unnecessary make-work program; despite the fact that non-planning has failed repeatedly in the past.)

Consider the possibility that she's not a con artist, but genuinely believes she's doing the Right Thing(TM) by protecting her beloved organisation and its exalted PointyHairedBoss from the ravages of the broken software created by those unpleasantly antisocial, undisciplined, careless, and lazy software developers. Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H misguided good intentions.

There are other traits she displays, such as blaming others for her mistakes, not apologizing when caught screwing up, not sharing information that others should have for the project, broadcasting others' mistakes widely, and being unnecessarily rude. Either way, the "trade-off load dump" pattern is disruptive to projects whether she intends it or not. It's caused wasted time and resources multiple times. If PHB's are repeatedly surprised by the down-sides on repeated attempts, then obviously there is a problem pattern. Whether she is entirely to "blame" or not is perhaps debatable, but the problem pattern is there. Her actions are disruptive, conscious or not. Nothing ends up getting done.

Perhaps she reasons like the GrammarVandal in that she's "saving the world from impurities". However, it's at the expense of having nothing written. We can kill the cancer by killing the entire patient. If you value dead cancer more than living patients, then you've indeed "done your job" of ridding the cancer.

However, this person does not display enough consistency to fit the purist profile. If you improve ease-of-learning by making it less flexible, it gets criticized for being inflexible. If you make it flexible by sacrificing ease-of-learning, it gets criticized for being hard to learn.

In an odd way, that is consistent with the "saving the world from impurities" theory. She may be trying to save the world, so to speak, from imperfection. Less-flexible but easy-to-learn is imperfect; so is hard-to-learn but flexible. What she wants easy-to-learn and flexible, dammit! Never mind that these are an impossible contradiction; that's the part she doesn't (or refuses to) understand.

But I ask her what a "correct" design and/or interface would look like, and she's either evasive, contradictory, or throws out BS buzzwords. If you don't have a fairly solidified idea of what a "good" design would be, then why complain about existing proposals? I suppose her "solution" to find a good one is to keep trashing candidate products until a good one comes along. In other words, shopping via sabotage. Most would agree that doing too of much of that is wasteful and time-consuming, but maybe she has no sense of economic and time proportions, similar to GV valuing grammatical accuracy over cross-individual meaning conveyance, and common manners.

Years ago, I had a client who demanded that a report be simultaneously sorted by two columns. He wanted customer statements sorted by both his customers' cheque numbers and his invoice numbers. At the same time. Of course, that was impossible -- a customer who paid invoices out of order (which was many of them) or who changed banks and resequenced their cheque numbers would mean you could sort sequentially by cheque number, or you could sort by invoice number, but not both. We gently pointed out the problem using a few real-life examples. His response was to shout at us, "You guys are the fucking experts! You fix it!" Then he stormed out of the room. The project was cancelled and he returned to using a 1950s era accounting machine that didn't sort anything.

I bet your Connie and my ex-client would have got along like a house on fire.

Sounds like a case of JustMakeItRight. At least in that case it's easy to explain to others why things went sour. If the tradeoffs are more complex or subtle, it's hard to present it in a way that shows you tried your best, as explained to evaluators not part of the project itself.
Sometimes I find that there is a 3rd alternative that may make the requester satisfied. For example, if most the checks are in order of the sequence number, then perhaps mark those that are out of sequence with an asterisk or exclamation point so it's clear where it "de-syncs". You may have to change the subject and probe about what they use the results for to figure out what may be a satisfactory compromise. Not always easy....

          Seq.Chck.Note
          004 1234
          005 1238
          006 1241
          007 1235 Seq.
          008 1242 
          009 Etc.

Also you could give him a sample scenario that includes out-of-sync numbering, and ask him to work it the way he wants it to be (on paper) at his leisure. After fiddling around with it, it may finally click to him that there is an inherent trade-off that is beyond mere technology issues. Do it nicely, though; don't criticize.
We tried that. Gently, and diplomatically, because we were very good both. Indeed, we obtained the contract from a competitor -- through a mutual contact, after both had decided he was incorrigible and impossible to please -- because we were singularly diplomatic and gentle. His answer to our suggesting that he show us what he meant was along the lines of, "WHY DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO YOUR GOD-DAMN FUCKING JOB FOR YOU?!" I think he didn't want a solution; he wanted to bask in the problem, maybe because it gave him an easy target to blame for other failings in his business.
- The bottom-line question is whether you want the contract/project or not. If you feel you can weather his outbursts and venting without ruining team morale, then it can make economic sense to live with heat. If on the other hand he's likely to do more beyond mere shouting, such as suing or sabotaging the project, then cut your loses and bail out. If you have a choice of working with less drama-generating customers, then seek them out and leave him behind. If economic conditions don't give you much of a choice, then let everyone on the project know the difficult situation and have CYA plans in place in case bleep happens. Generally, difficult customers should be more profitable on average to compensate for their drama and risk. If a given customer is both a drama bag AND low margin, then move on.
- As far as "doing your [bleep] job for you" statement, given enough thought, I'd probably reply something like, "As we best understand the issue, it would violate the laws of arithmetic, which obviously nobody wants. Thus, it looks like the real problem is that we don't yet understand what you really need. Talking to you is the only way we know how to figure out what you really need. We know talking to geeks is often not a pleasant experience (show humility), but it's all we can offer right now. I assure you, we are doing are best to solve this. You are welcome to ask others firms for solutions. They may indeed be smarter than us." (Again, show humility. Humility is a great disarming technique.)
- Indeed, we showed all due humility when it was appropriate, and other appropriate responses where they were most likely to work. We were good at this, noted for pleasing clients throughout our market area that were usually considered insatiable. He was, in nearly thirty years of dealing with clients of various sorts, the only one with whom I've had such difficulties. (I've had a few who didn't accept our bid -- I'm not cheap -- but that's something different.) The mistake, of course, was mine: I failed to recognise an individual who had no intention of being pleased. By anything. Ever.
And don't insult or belittle such people. Don't claim he's "violating the laws of logic" or the like, just admit you currently are stumped for a solution and say it may take time to brainstorm a "fix" and that you'll likely have to ask him some more questions. That way he'll be prepared to invest some time to understand the problem himself. You are essentially finding a way to "trick" him into investing time understanding the issue. If he threatens to find a different company, perhaps you should let him: he may be a difficult customer and sometimes you should let those go. When the other company finds a satisfactory solution, you can peak in to learn what they did, and you are thus smarter about finding work-arounds.
We picked up this client after he'd been through, as far as we could tell, every accounting firm in town. None of them would have anything to do with him. After he returned to using his 1950s era accounting machine, the business folded a few months later. Perhaps that's what he'd wanted all along.
Perhaps. Productivity is sometimes secondary to other personal goals in managers, not unlike Connie perhaps. I wonder what would happen if you emulated the 1950's equipment/techniques he liked, with enough modern twists to make it competitive, assuming you had such hindsight. Do you think that would have worked?
It's unlikely. Hints from his secretary suggested he was only interested in drinking in the bar with his cronies; the business was an unpleasant burden that cut into his drinking time. Life had last been good when he was young in the 1950s, and the old accounting machine was a reminder of those better days. An old accounting machine re-envisioned on a modern computer probably would only have been insulting and "taking the piss", to use a British phrase that uniquely captures the appropriate degree of casual mockery that such an attempt probably would have (unintentionally) implied.
Only one "F" customer, not bad. Consider yourself lucky. Perhaps a Jack Daniels UI would be to his fitting.

The upside is that we still get paid to reinvent doomed wheels. We should learn to enjoy the violins on the Titanic and be grateful they have an orchestra. Maybe there is an art to appreciate in her sabotage, similar to CleverTrollAdmiration.

Patterns and techniques:

Claim the alternative(s) is quick and easy to prepare using buzzwords and RedHerrings (below), when in fact it's no more a SilverBullet than the targeted implementation.
Emphasize, repeat, and over-dramatize the down-sides of target project without mentioning the upsides, often behind closed doors so that nobody can refute them.
Withhold significant criticisms until the last minute when it's too late to do something about it. Insignificant criticisms (below) are doled out earlier to hide your timing trick.
Use buzzwords to dazzle clueless managers. "I propose we use Zamma Zuper 8.0 instead because it has automatic conformation matrix optimization to make it rarely crash."
Make up hard-to-implement requirements that are not really requirements. Scatter in buzzwords so that clueless managers don't recognize the pork in the requirements document.
Get friends and family to log complaints in the feedback contacts or forms to make small problems look bigger than they are.
Fake demos to make something look almost ready by hard-wiring in results etc. If caught, claim you are just testing the screen flow and forgot to take out the "testing props".
Whenever there's a critical deadline, their computer or server just happens to have a weird problem, such as a corrupt or missing DLL, etc.
RedHerrings: Complain about lots of little, mundane things to higher managers to tie you down fixing minutia while more important features get ignored in the process.
A master of FearUncertaintyAndDoubt.

I discovered at least one possible "rational" motivation factor. Connie often gets overtime pay to fix critical problems or redo "crashed" content and seems to really enjoy the extra cash. Thus, if she can make the system fragile and rickety, she is more likely to get overtime. It's the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.

Further, her (selectively) rotten personality scares away cross-trainees such that often she just happens to be the only person who knows how to fix stuff, and more importantly break stuff at "convenient" times to get her overtime.

Anecdotes

Connie probably deleted an important folder. Although nobody directly accused her of doing it, she got defensive and said something like, "I can't delete it, I don't have "write" access. Besides, I put under-scores at the start of folder names to hide them (from the visible listings) rather than delete." Somebody pointed out that if she has access to put under-scores, then she probably also has write access. She went quiet.

She claimed she likes hot weather. Somebody later whispered, "That's why she's not afraid of hell."

Somebody called her "Bernie Madoff's dumber sibling". Group chuckle.

Connie as a fire-fighter: "Oh, you mean I'm supposed to put OUT fires?"

Simplified version of a true story:

Our locations were being moved and the issue of who gets what new destination cubicle came up. We decided to flip a coin.
So I take out a coin, Connie calls heads, and I proceed to flip. It bounces around and lands behind the desk. We both walk around the desk to look, I happened to be slightly closer.
As soon as she's in view of the coin, which was tails, she says, "It was out of my view and thus you could have kicked it. Let's re-flip". I reply, "Well, okay, but this time you flip."
So Connie takes the coin and flips it. Tails again. Connie immediately blurts out, "Oh wait, we should ask our supervisor first. She may want to decide who goes where. We are usurping Lisa (the supervisor)."
So we walk over to Lisa's office and ask her who gets what cubicle. Lisa replies, "I'll leave the choice to you guys".
Before I could tell Lisa about the prior flip (tails), Connie suddenly blurts out, "Lisa, we'd like you to witness the coin toss to make sure it's fair and square." I then mentioned the prior toss, but Connie replied, "But it would be fairer with a witness. The past tosses were controversial, remember?" I didn't want to start an argument in front of Lisa, so I went along.
Coin toss in Lisa's office: heads. Connie gets 1st cubicle choice. 2/3 of my thoughts were screaming bloody murder, and 1/3 were performing CleverTrollAdmiration. She is obviously experienced at such.

[cough] When it comes time for RussianRouletteWithAnAutomatic? be sure to offer her the first dibs.

I'd even give her 4-to-1 odds on the bet, to sweeten the pot.

Both her bosses were away, and drama spiked. Probable thought: "Hmmm, these spare bosses don't know I'm a jerk yet. Time to leverage that..."

Our group has pondered why Connie is not using her large basket of con skills in a business that pays more for the ability to dupe customers, such as insurance sales or Wall Street. Our conclusion is that her evil tends to only focus on about a month out. She's not capable of longer-term evil because she lacks the discipline. She seems to want instant gratification and would rather kill lots of rodents rather than hold off for an occasional moose. And perhaps figuratively kicking people is more pleasurable to her than money. She's managed to work her way into a position that's uniquely suited to be able to agitate the most people per hour. I don't think she's a sociopath because sociopaths don't care about feelings of others. She cares deeply about others' feelings, but cares about hurting them. I don't know the correct term for that characteristic.

The correct term is "asshole".

Too broad. We need sub-classifications for asshole.

I'd rather not examine assholes that closely.

So you won't take a holistic approach? Sometimes they come to you whether you want them to or not.

"Would rather kill lots of rodents ... than hold off for an occasional moose." That's the best phrase I've read here in a while.