Corncob

This project anti-pattern is usually describing bad or difficult people that affects the entire project and team. Usually this type of people has strong influences in project decision making.

Symptoms and Consequences

• Team or project is unable to make progress become someone disagrees with their key objectives or essential processes and continually tries to change them.
• One person continually raise objections, under the guise of concern, which are intractable: performance, reliability, technology market share, and so on.
• Political force where the team ignores or just pleasing that person.
• Heavy political environment.

Causes

• Corncob person has hidden agenda, which conflicts with team's goals.
• Fundamental disagreement between team members that no amount of communication can resolve.
• Management does not isolate group from internal and external forces, and has inappropriately allocated roles to staff, who abuse them for their own needs.
• Management failed to allocate accountability at all.

Refactor Recipes

There are various depending on scenarios:

Tactical

• Transfer the responsibility.
• Isolate the issue.
• Question the question.

Operational

• Corrective interview.
• Friendly outplacement.

Strategic

• Corncob support group.
• Empty department.
• Reduction in force.