Often, when confronted with something (people, products, methodologies...) which is clearly underperforming, management is in denial and comes up with all sort of workarounds (rather than burying the horse and buying a new one) as the famous "flog the dead horse" story teaches:
- Buying a stronger whip.
- Changing riders.
- Say things like, “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”
- Appointing a committee to study the horse.
- Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
- Increasing the standards to ride dead horses.
- Appointing a tiger team to revive the dead horse.
- Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.
- Comparing the state of dead horses in today’s environment.
- Change the requirements declaring that “This horse is not dead.”
- Hire contractors to ride the dead horse.
- Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.
- Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”
- Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.
- Do a Cost Analysis study to see if contractors can ride it cheaper.
- Purchase a product to make dead horses run faster.
- Declare the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.
- Form a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.
- Revisit the performance requirements for horses.
- Say this horse was procured with cost as an independent variable.
- Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.
I will add more as they come to my mind:
22. ask a consultant to provide the dead horse detailed instructions on how to trot
23. ask a consultant to define SLAs to prove that the horse is actually dead and not simply agonizing
(this things come to my mind because I have desperately tried to push a developer to actually deliver something.... had I done it myself it would have cost me a lot less energies)
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