Dysfunctional Project Management Patterns

Inspired by the Gang of Four patterns for object oriented software development, Michael Duell proposes in this article some patterns for dysfunctional project management behavior. He classifies them in the cremational, destructural and misbehavioral patterns categories.

Here are some examples:

• The Abject Poverty Pattern is evident in software that is so difficult to test and maintain that doing so results in massive budget overruns.
• The Compromise Pattern is used to balance the forces of schedule vs. quality. The result is software of inferior quality that is still late.
• The Absolver Pattern is evident in problem ridden code developed by former employees. So many historical problems have been traced to this software that current employees can absolve their software of blame by claiming that the absolver is responsible for any problem reported. Also known as It’s-not-in-my-code.

Read the remaining patters on http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/fun/prog/resign-patterns