The Colonel

The Daily WTF is always an amusing site for anyone involved in software development. Many of the stories are grisly coding horrors, but since I haven’t been a developer for many years, I find the best stories are the tales of project management trainwrecks. A reminder than no matter how bad the worst project you ever worked on, someone, somewhere has had it far worse.

This one, featuring “The Colonel” is a classic tale of how putting someone with no knowledge or understanding of how software is created can go horribly, horribly wrong.

The project started out on the wrong foot, with something that happens all-too-often with statups.

As for their problem: The Colonel and his sales team told prospects that the prototype was their core product, and managed to sell a handful of licenses for it … To ensure that programmers were focused on programming, The Colonel cut out a lot of the unnecessary parts of the software development process like system design and testing.

As the whole thing goes pear-shaped it shows the failure mode of authoritarian command-and-control management.

To no one’s surprise, the crackdown didn’t quite help morale or increase business in the least. It did lower expenses quite a bit; by the time this next email was sent out, twelve of the staff had resigned:

While The Colonel sounds like a textbook case of an ex-military type unable to cope with the civilian world, I can’t help feeling he would have been equally disastrous leading troops on the battlefield.