Smoke and Mirrors

This project anti-pattern is mainly due to irrational managers managing the project.

Symptoms and Consequences

• Increase staff frustrations.
• Incremental delay to delivery.
• Exploitation by Corncobs.

Causes

• Staffing issue (staff, manager, boss, etc.). These people:
  • has no clear vision or strategy
  • fear of success
  • is ignorant of true state of project activities and deliverable.
• Bad processes.

Refactor Recipes

In General

• Admit and recognize the problem and get help.
• Understand the development staff.
• Provide clear, short-term goals.
• Share a focus.
• Look for process improvement.
• Facilitate communications.
• Manage communications mechanisms.
• Manage by exception.
• Apply effective decision-making techniques.

Situational

• List all of the concerns.
• Rate the concerns with respect to three criteria: seriousness, urgency, and growth potentials. Use high, medium, low as the values to estimate it.
• Tabulate scores for each item based upon the ratings.
• Prioritize the items in terms of the scores.
• Assign the items that can be resolved to the appropriate staff.
• Work on the top-priority items on the list.

Decisional

• Define the scope of the decision to be addressed.
• Identify alternative solutions for resolving the decision.
• Define the decision criteria.
• Define the criteria between the essentials and desirable.
• Determine whether the alternatives satisfy all the essential criteria.
• Perform any fact finding.
• Set up a table display all the possible alternatives that leads to the respective consequences.
• Multiply the weights by the ranks to calculate a score for each position in the matrix.
• Be aware of rational choice may not be the choice managers or customers will accept.