The effect of office politics on any project is like the effect of kryptonite on Superman. Simply the more of it the slower the project goes until eventually the project grinds to a halt. If you saw the Sport Relief version of The Apprentice in March 2008 and witnessed Lembit Opik, Liberal Democrat MP for Montgomeryshire negotiate on behalf of his team, you’ll know exactly the point I’m trying to get across.
In my last post I talked about Geoff Polites and how he made space for people to work and protected them from things like politics that would impede their progress. This is an essential skill for successful project managers and IT directors and those that have it are rewarded with highly efficient teams. Keeping negative politics away from a development team isn’t easy, particularly in bigger organisations but failure to do so can lead to direction and time being lost in many ways.
As we’ve already discussed, having a project sponsor helps in many ways including cutting through politics, assuming the sponsor has more of a “get the job done” mindset and isn’t a political animal.
I’ve found an article called Politics-Oriented Software Development. Whilst slightly tongue in cheek, it does ring true in many places.
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