September 2nd, 2006
The next question that I want to re-visit about death march projects is pretty straightforward: why would anyone in his or her right mind volunteer to participate in a project whose budget, schedule, and resource allocation is so aggressive that 80-hour workweeks are a virtual certainty?
When I first wrote the book a decade ago, I suggested the following explanations:
- The risks are high, but so are the rewards
- The “Mt. Everest” syndrome
- The “buzz” of working intensely with other committed people
- The naivete and optimism of youth
- The alternative is unemployment
- It’s a prerequisite for future advancement/promotion
- The alternative is bankruptcy or some other calamity
- It’s an opportunity to escape the “normal” bureaucracy
- Revenge
As with yesterday’s blog about the justification/rationale for launching a death-marchp project, I don’t have a sense that any of these explanations have changed very much in the past decade. But I could be wrong, and I’d like to get some feedback. I’m still planning to track down and install a sophisticated poll/survey system so that I can capture more detailed information, but for the moment, here’s a “quickie” survey mechanism that just captures what I think are probably the top five reasons people are still volunteering for death-march projects:
September 8th, 2006 at 12:52 pm
The accurate answer is that there are a variety of reasons, but any more I think people have become so cynical about their organizations that all projects are viewed in terms of the economic value to the individual, regardless of the impact on the organization.
Even ‘permanent’ employees know that they’ll be changing jobs in the future, and that the ability to compete for positions will be based on the set of skills and experiences they personally possess. Organizational consequences are secondary considerations.
Project failure is not a mystery, and the mechanics of getting there are quite well understood. If you argue against some of this stupidity, it gets held against you. If the organization has money to waste that way, why should I not to profit from it.
Healthy organizations experience disproportional success, but the managers that can produce healthy organizations are few and far between. Most organizations are failures, and Drucker was pointing out in the ’60s that the expected life of a successful organization was only about 20 years. There are no Death March projects that ultimately save a sick organization, but that doesn’t stop them from trying.
All of this leads to people getting on, getting experience, and then bailing before it goes to crap.