Thursday, July 12, 2007
Enterprise Architecture: Let's Play Team...
If you are a male, you may have grown up playing the now politically incorrect game of cowboys and indians. If you are female, you may have played with Barbie dolls and lived in a dream world where all men look like Ken. Sadly, regardless if you are male or female, you probably work in a place where you now play team...
Schedules are paramount! Before you know what you need to deliver, you have already been assigned a date. The veins in management's foreheads are pulsing. Tension and fear are high amongst team members. Your project manager is nothing but PMI certified process weenie who doesn't understand technology who is considering adding more people to a late project while paradoxically trying to figure out how to not make it later. Luckily, if you are playing team, then you may have already figured out that the notion of milestones are primarily paper exercises.
The solution in this situation is to pretend to be a team. Present a unified front through the project manager or other appointed spokesperson, but otherwise don't fix the root cause of being dysfunctional. Under no circumstance should you ever collaborate. You should go back to your childhood and understand that the Cowboys never collaborated with the Indians. Don't collaborate and instead think about contract negotiation.
Don't matter what, convince management especially those who are process weenies that don't understand technology that everything is on schedule. Make sure that every member of the team appears to be very busy, produce large comprehensive documents and convince others that your software works but don't actually give them an opportunity to use it. After all, if users actually try your software, they can only find that things may not work as advertised.
Remember, the key whether you are Barbie looking for your Ken or simply attempting to survive outsourcing, you and your coworkers have to be savage in playing team...
| | View blog reactionsSchedules are paramount! Before you know what you need to deliver, you have already been assigned a date. The veins in management's foreheads are pulsing. Tension and fear are high amongst team members. Your project manager is nothing but PMI certified process weenie who doesn't understand technology who is considering adding more people to a late project while paradoxically trying to figure out how to not make it later. Luckily, if you are playing team, then you may have already figured out that the notion of milestones are primarily paper exercises.
The solution in this situation is to pretend to be a team. Present a unified front through the project manager or other appointed spokesperson, but otherwise don't fix the root cause of being dysfunctional. Under no circumstance should you ever collaborate. You should go back to your childhood and understand that the Cowboys never collaborated with the Indians. Don't collaborate and instead think about contract negotiation.
Don't matter what, convince management especially those who are process weenies that don't understand technology that everything is on schedule. Make sure that every member of the team appears to be very busy, produce large comprehensive documents and convince others that your software works but don't actually give them an opportunity to use it. After all, if users actually try your software, they can only find that things may not work as advertised.
Remember, the key whether you are Barbie looking for your Ken or simply attempting to survive outsourcing, you and your coworkers have to be savage in playing team...
