People Problem

Several stories.

1. Poor architecture prepared by a lead developer who rejected to redesign the whole thing as he didn’t consider a person who proposed changes as knowledgeable enough. It ended in a series of functionality issues and bugs in the application. The reason laid within people characters.

2. Low efficiency of the whole team which was organized to allow its boss work effortlessly. It wasn’t the team itself which didn’t want to engage. It was the boss who saw the more work his people have, the more he has himself.

3. A developer put extreme effort in to rescue the project. Unfortunately it wasn’t possible anyway. He saw his extraordinary engagement. His bosses saw the failure and rejected to reward him. The guy left few months later.

4. A manager of development team who was considered by project managers as the one who they didn’t want to work with. As far as there was no supervision from the higher management cooperation with the manager sucked. The effect was the projects were dealt unfairly among development teams. Higher management refused to do anything to solve the problem.

5. Guy was made a sacred cow in his department after a couple of other experienced employees left. He ended up forcing ideas which seemed cool for him, not those which were valuable for the project or the team. A list of issues was invited as several cool decisions brought loads of additional work to the rest of people.

6. Higher managers were treated differently. The sales guy was always right while the technical guy was usually ignored. It ended up with selling things which weren’t feasible or profitable. The technical guy was the one to blame. He left. His successor did the same.

OK, where’s the point? The real reason of all this situations is similar. It’s a people problem. No matter if you think about flawed architecture, rotation among valuable people, wrong workflow or poor cooperation. It is people problem

Either individual goals are different than organization goals or the person’s character somehow doesn’t stick to the rest of the team or there’s personal conflict between people which affects everyday work.

You should accept neither of them. In many cases issue can be solved. As far as clear expectations are shown people can change. I saw them leaving their ego aside and then, voila, magic happened. They were using their time and experience to push things further instead of fighting with environment.

When it doesn’t work, well, you always have the ultimate way of changing things in the workplace as a plan B.