Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior (Dorset House eBooks)

9. Management By Mood Ring1

8. Eye Contact The organization tends to co-locate project personnel when the work is both urgent and complex.

One of my clients was receiving project requests from more than one hundred different sources. Each of the requests was in a different form and level of detail, but none gave a coherent picture of what the requestor was trying to achieve.

Most adrenaline junkie organizations contain at least one bottleneck. This is the hero who makes all the design decisions, is the only source of requirements, or makes all the architectural decisions. He is playing two roles: One is to make himself appear to be busier than mere mortals can hope to be. The second is to produce a logjam of decision-m

In organizations where eye contact applies, urgency and complexity are trump cards that can be used to secure co-location of the project team.

The manager reports status based on the activities, efforts, and enthusiasms of the team rather than on the risks, decisions, and issues facing the project.

Tales around the campfire.

Humans are effective improvers, naturally, and few of us are naturally comfortable creating from whole cloth.

What’s so bad about managers being optimistic and displaying a little emotion? Nothing, of course. But when you find a project manager whose communication is skewed very strongly to this end of the spectrum, you will typically discover two problems. First, this style of reporting does not really fulfill the most fundamental purpose of all project s