Design By Committee Never Works
It's sad that I don't have a lot of nice things to say about work these days. Very sad. And one of the very saddest things is that I find myself in this current mode of Design by Committee, and it's just crazy. The problem really originates with the idea that the Big Boss wants to make a group of highly-skilled, high-power developers, that can work together and get things done. This model is very anti-committee of any kind. It's almost the best of the Cowboy coder. It's good people making good decisions, communicating when they need to, for what they need, but not wasting any time.
It's a dream job, to me. And they sold me on it.
But it's not come to pass. Rather, it was close, but we've drifted so far away from that in a few short period of time that it's like it was a distant memory. And what I'm living now is as bad a place of micromanagement as I can remember being.
So we have the users - several different groups. And they all are competing with each other to get things done. This was, and is, very inefficient, and so to solve that, the business put one guy in charge, and all business requests go through him. It's his job to make sure that the different business groups are on-board. He's the one guy we need to go to to get answers. And unfortunately, he's not checking in with some of the groups.
This is brought to my attention by my manager, who used to run the tech for one of these other groups. He's a nice guy, but he's got some views on how to run projects that I find more than a little stifling, and while I've tried to talk to him, I've given up of late, as it's just not doing any good.
So we have communication problems. We have misrepresentation of users' needs due to that. We have poor management styles. We have bad testing procedures. In short, the only thing I can think that we're doing right is… OK… give me a sec… Hmmm… well… I can't think of a thing we're doing right. All that's going right is being done in spite of this place.
And if I had to point to one thing - it's the communication. It's so bad, nothing really has a chance. Holy Cow!