Corporate Animosity among Teams
I promise this will also be about project management.
Obviously, in large organizations you have a bunch of international teams consisting of individuals from all around the world, working on the same software solution. Each team being responsible for a particular part of the software. However, you also have the local teams that communicate using the local language and local teams that communicate in English due to it consisting of foreign individuals. Sometimes, things go wrong or misunderstanding arise during the project, creating friction between the teams. These stay unresolved and the project suffers because of this. This is what I want to talk about today.
No Manager that dares to address the communication issues head on
When problems arise, certain managers have the tendency to shove some of their responsibility to the teams themselves. Instead of them taking a stand and bring the teams together with their managerial prowess they push this issue back to the teams under the excuse of them being “self organizing teams” and that they should collectively approach and come up with a solution themselves. Approaching the manager itself as a team often proves to be an issue in itself due to possible similar issues that occurred in the past involving the same manager.
Back and Forth blaming
A typical observation is that teams start blaming each other for problems that occur before, during or after the release of the software or when its already running in production. Cause of errors, lack of user experience, lack of synchronization between teams, to name a few examples, will get a stamp with the other team being responsible for the problems, as the de facto reason.
Complete Project Stagnation
As problems become even more severe, people start leaving the department, won’t assume all of their responsibilities anymore or will leave the company all together. These dynamics, which are often difficult to measure can also have a massive impact on the success of a project and could make it, at some point, impossible to keep managing the project and leads to a total stop of the project.
It might be so that both teams need to be reassigned to other projects or even fired so that fresh new souls, oblivious to the legacy of their predecessors, can be hired to clean up the mess.