Erik Meade's Blog

Knowing when to stop

When will there be enough evidence that death marches are unsuccessful/unhealthy enough to prevent them? Most excuses I hear from business are arguments from ignorance. Once you address ignorance, business moves to the next most convenient fallacy.

At what point is it in the best interest of business to understand how high project failure and employee health costs affect their bottom line?

Comments

• Bitch, bitch, bitch. That's what the higher ups will say. Often it's a product of IT's ability for fast turn around in one area of technology vs regular,slow pace for another.

  I love my job and expect death marches to continue regularly for the rest of my career. Several death marches led to faster promotions since I handled them bettern then fellow workers. Often it is the business and how bad they are making the death march that makes me decide to leave or not.

  Posted by: smartinumcp on January 10, 2005 at 08:48 AM

• Death marches breed more death marches.Team members don't get a chance to trust and learn about one another under the fierce pressure of a death march.Teams and management don't get a chance to figure out what it takes to be successful when they are always fighting fires.New technologies and methodologies are hard incorporate while under the gun. This is significant because sometimes new technologies can increase productivity ten-fold.New hires don't get trained - they get thrown to the wolves. An dem wolves like to eat.Our management here is celebrating because we have worked '1000,0000 hours without a day lost to injury.' It would be interesting if we could consider mental heath and fatigue in this stat.

  Posted by: beamsack on January 10, 2005 at 02:40 PM

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