Dramatis Personæ

I had a thought the other day about how people in groups tend to give in to a sort of social entropy, or drama, the longer and closer the association. This is especially dangerous in long term software engineering projects. One only has to look at the open source community to see how fractious and petty people can become when they have nothing better to do.

Before I expand on that thought I want to back up and talk about the reason that this topic came to mind. A few days ago I was talking to a friend of mine and he said his parents were leaving their church. Now, I guess this is no big deal to some but I happen to know that they had been members of that congregation for over thirty years. Let that sink in. What, you may ask, were they willing to end that relationship over? It wasn't dogma, or attendance, or really anything related to the practice of religion. It was things like donations, appropriations, clubs, and extra-curricular activities.

So we have groups of people who are aligned in ideology and purpose who get so bogged down in the details of their interpersonal associations that they cannot continue.

Now, does that sound like a project you've worked on?

So, as I was saying, sometimes people have nothing better to do. It might be more accurate to say that they have exhausted their productive tasks and have decided to either be "productive" on behalf of others or to "help" others do the right thing. This invariably leads to a lot of hurt feelings and squished toes. Other times it's an expression of "my way or the highway" or a battle over a perceived resource.

These internecine conflicts have got to go.

I've worked on one project where there were eight (or so) women working for one older, very polite, gentleman. He was one of the most henpecked men I've ever met. It seemed like every single person on his team could claim top priority at any given moment. They were all fighting for a shared resource, his attention and time. This led to constant squabbling in the office and a drastic reduction in productivity. I think the most telling thing about this situation is that it occurred near the end of a project when most of the goals were complete and people were running out of things to do. When you get down to brass tacks and try and finish something off is where things really start to go awry. As the expression goes: "the devil is in the details."

I worked on another project that had a high turnover rate (something like one person a month with a team of 20 people on a two year project) and it had nothing to do with the project itself. The project was well funded, reasonably well managed, effective, and was on a product that helped people go to school. The problem was interpersonal relationships and tons of mistrust. Every day the sky was falling. Why? Because, that's why. This kind of systematic behavior eventually caused me to look elsewhere myself.

I guess what I'm driving at is that even well managed, well paying, effective, efficient, and otherwise wonderful projects can fail based on the personal relationships of the stakeholders. This is true even when each and every single stakeholder is personally aligned with the goals of the project. Perhaps it's even more likely in that situation because people feel like they have more at stake. Too often in this industry we forget the human factors that drive our business. Careful tending and leadership of your team can help prevent these issues.

Bottom line: we're not robots even though we sometimes play them at work.