Day: February 4, 2008

Organizational anti-patterns

This is stolen, holus bolus, from a wikipedia article on Anti Patterns.

How many of these classic screwups characterize your organization?

  • Accidental ownership: Employee is given a system that was tangentially related to their system and left to poorly maintain it without proper training, growth or focus (common among phone->network administrators in the late 90’s)
  • Analysis paralysis: Devoting disproportionate effort to the analysis phase of a project
  • Captain in the engine room: The leader spends his time and attention on technical details, and nobody’s running the ship
  • Cash cow: A profitable legacy product that often leads to complacency about new products
  • Continuous obsolescence: Devoting disproportionate effort to porting a system to new environments
  • Cost migration: Transfer of project expenses to a vulnerable department or business partner
  • Crisis mode (a.k.a firefighting mode): Dealing with things only when they become a crisis, with the result that everything becomes a crisis
  • Design by committee: The result of having many contributors to a design, but no unifying vision
  • Escalation of commitment: Failing to revoke a decision when it proves wrong
  • Hero-mode: A policy of continuously relying on the heroic efforts of staff in order to meet impossible deadlines, whilst ignoring the long term cost of failing to build in software quality from the outset.
  • I told you so: When the ignored warning of an expert proves justified, and this becomes the focus of attention
  • Management by hope: Assuming that silence means everything is going well
  • Management by neglect: Too much delegation
  • Management by numbers: Paying excessive attention to quantitative management criteria, when these are non-essential or cost too much to acquire
  • Management by perkele: Authoritarian style of management with no tolerance for dissent
  • Management by wondering: Expecting a team to define their own objectives, and then wondering what they’re doing
  • Moral hazard: Insulating a decision-maker from the consequences of his or her decision.
  • Mushroom management: Keeping employees uninformed and misinformed (kept in the dark and fed manure)
  • Not invented here (a.k.a. N.I.H.): Ignoring an idea or implementation originated outside the organization
  • Polishing the polish: Giving a subordinate or team a finished project to work on, prohibiting them from doing anything else, and then complaining about their productivity
  • Scope creep (along with the closely related terms complexity trap and featuritis): Allowing the scope of a project to grow without proper control
  • Stovepipe: A structure that supports mostly up-down flow of data but inhibits cross organizational communication
  • Vendor lock-in: Making a system excessively dependent on an externally supplied component
  • Violin string organization: A highly tuned and trimmed organization with no flexibility

Who pulled the plug…

… that was blocking my brain?

 

I wrote FOUR SONGS yesterday.  One is a love song to Al Swearengen from Deadwood – one is a blues tune about the Blue Hell, a bar from the Fred Pohl Heechee Chronicles – one is a narsty emo bytchefest between Gelis and Niccolo from Dunnett’s series which references their ongoing telepathic mindgames – and the last is a breakneck, kickass song about the current culture war between faith and reason.

The “If I were Al Swearengen” song nearly fell out of my head right after I wrote it.  When I wrote it, I thought it was all in the same time signature – silly me! Then I go to sing it back and the choruses don’t work.  What happened?  (Or as Paul remarked, “You weren’t recording it?”)  It’s in two time signatures (waltz and mildly syncopated 4/4) which is just bloody bizarre but completely fits the mood of the song.

Anyway, I suspect that somebody went to a shrine somewhere and prayed for me, because that was the most amazing thing that’s happened to me in years.  That sound you hear is a giant mental drain unclogging.

I light a candle for Patricia, who has an owie.  (Further details as authorized).

I light a candle for Katie, who will love Daxus until death or something like it.  I was that stupid at 19, but at least I loved worthier men.