Bulldozer00's Blog

Working on a product that requires a multi-disciplined engineering team can be a fun and exhilarating growth experience. However, the fun can be snuffed out by poor management of negative external forces. The figure below shows just some of the forces that can derail a project.

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By far, the pressure exerted by the management chain can cause  the most harm to the product and development team. In some companies, the lower level managers are zero resistance conductors of schedule pressure exerted by the higher ups. The negative effects of this pressure are absorbed directly by the development team.

Since I think that all people in an organization are always trying to do the right thing, the reason that this operational behavior is so ubiquitous is that the perps aren’t aware of what they’re doing. In mindful organizations that are aware, the management chain instills a mild and tempered sense of urgency that increases performance without causing harm.