Black hole project – Part II: “Rugby ball and overcoat”

I took this picture in Paris, at Gare Montparnasse in September. France gave home to the Rugby World Cup in 2007, everything was preparing for the event, and this statue was one of several art pieces all around the city, showing a rugby player and civilians working together as a team.

How does it connect to a project? The second lesson I personally learned from the project I wrote about in “It’s a Babel Fish”, was the necessity of teamwork.

Yes, I know, it’s basic and everyone stresses it all the time, teamwork is important, teamwork is indispensable, but most of the time it’s about teamwork with your co-workers, the developers in your own company.

What I mean is the teamwork with the client, and your partner contractors. Duh, you say, that’s agile. I don’t know if it is agile or not, I think it’s basic common sense – which, as we know is not that common -, what I know that not working as a team with your customer, and with the other contractors, or worse, treating them as antagonists, hurts your project big time.

It should be like on the picture above. The whole project depends not only on the players – the developers of your team – but on the fans and the cheer team – the client and the other participants of the project – too.

Too many times I saw that after the contract has been signed everyone goes home and starts to work independently, not really caring about what the other does – of course, there are all the mandatory e-mails, the excel files, the task lists, the status reports speeding back and forth, that gives the appearance of working together, but that’s all, if you scratch the surface you quickly discover that there is no real knowledge, actual nobody knows what the others are doing. All you have to do is ask any member of the project team “what is the client doing with the project?” and you will find it out rather quickly.

And if you have some disruptive elements in your project – like people at the client company, who wants the project to fail, a situation that rather frequent – then you will have a pretty hard time.

And as not working a team means there is no real communication either, you end up peering into the “Fog of War”, which makes avoiding and defending against surprises almost impossible.