1- Incompetent management: The management skills of middle and top management are very poor. Firstly the managers do not understand how the software industry works and then do not have the inclination of learning how it works. The people management skills of most of these managers can be gauged from the fact that a four member team has seen 8 people leave(in 2 years time) because they couldn't work in the VW IS environment.
2-Management focus: The top managers hardly play any role in the success of the IT projects. Top/middle managers or project manager hardly come into picture.
One senior manager seemed to have just one role - point out to people that "this door can't be used for exit", "you need to wear tie" "you are only working the normal working hours??"
3-work-life balance: It is a very clear message from managers that developers need to work more that the normal working hours(No, budget doesn't permit overtime).
Their estimates are generally very very poor and people end up working on weekends.
To give you an idea of the estimates: For one project the development lead estimated 115 man days of effort however the total development effort was 500+ man days..that too when developers had to cut corners to get the minimum functionality delivered.
I don't think there was even a proper discussion on why the estimates were so wrong.
4-software development processes:
Agile? -NO
Waterfall?- NO
adhoc? - yes
wierd? -yes
depends on the whims and fancy of managers? - NO (remember that managers do not come into picture at all)
depends on the whims and fancy of lead? - YES and NO (yes, the development process keeps changing on the whims and fancy of the lead, however as the lead has no control - developers can divert the process at will)
Does the process work? - Good question!!
5-more focus on lip service than performance: This organisation doesn't value performance. To be really valued, one needs to be close to either the lead or the manager and if so, then he can get away with murder.
6-Highly political environment: 99% of employees in this department are contractors, including lead and project manager. First focus of these people is to cover their ^**£% and think about the task in hand later.
It is a highly political environment. Good people keep leaving as they can't survive and the crappies keep accumulating.
7- Not learning from mistakes: The worst part is that the VW IS department is not learning from its mistakes. I could see the same mistakes being repeated over and over again.
