You Know Your Project Is Dysfunctional If...
I discuss below five easy-to-recognize smells that point to some serious dysfunction within your project team. Often the dysfunction can be traced to a specific person who is poisoning the team. Most likely it's a team member who is defensive and doesn't wish to ask for help or be called out when s/he makes a mistake. But it can also be a stakeholder who is too overbearing and/or disengaged. Either way, these smells are merely symptoms (like an incessant cough that finally causes you to seek a doctor's professional opinion). Don't make the mistake of interpreting symptoms as problems. Fixing the symptom without ferreting out and addressing the underlying malady will only make the problem worse. (Analogous to taking cough syrup when what you really need is an x-ray to identify pneumonia.) So, here's my list of top five smells I use to identify a dysfunctional project. You can't remember the last time you saw two team members huddled over the same comput...