Innovation Killers...

I'm in the mood for some ranting, so I just wanted to list some things that I think are definite innovation killers in a software development shop. This is not aimed at any particular company - I've heard of these things happening in many places, and some of these scenarios were discussed in one of my graduate school classes.

Projects that come to dev already designed, and the dev team must work to the spec regardless of whether or not it makes sense...

Projects that have little proof of providing business value, but one or two high level executives are pushing it...

Projects where schedule is more important than quality (when they are the rule, rather than the exception)...

Projects where there are more people waving red, yellow and green flags than people who can actually produce any artifacts...

Projects that are "too big to fail..."

Projects where new components are introduced because the teams working on the existing code base are bogged down in other projects... It's like the design is being determined by the structure of the org chart, rather than what makes sense based on business need and existing technology.

Projects where new teams are allowed to come in without any prior domain knowledge, don't ask any questions, don't pick up of the learned experiences of teams who have been working in the domain, and introduce bugs that experienced teams would have avoided...

People who are really really busy making work for themselves that has limited value and not learning the difference between busy work and what provides value...

People who act like everything is an emergency. If everything is priority 1, nothing is priority 1...

People who don't bother to understand the big picture...

Just saying....