4 ms·

>most project failures I see are failures of empathy That is quite the statement. Would you provide some examples of situations that made you come to this conc

>most project failures I see are failures of empathy That is quite the statement. Would you provide some examples of situations that made you come to this conclusion?

watwut 6y ago
Lack of empathy toward user/client made him replace us. Real story. Lack of empathy toward programmers led to imppssible schedule. Real story. Lack of empathy between team members who were supposed to lead cause spectacular dysfunction of team I am in right now.
anm89 6y ago
Very few software projects in my experience fail because they were too technically difficult and/or that the people involved were incapable of working through some technical problem. When I say failures of empathy, I'm not even saying that that was the failure of a single person to empathize, but that at the end of the day the collective parties could not understand enough about what all the other parties needed to create an actionable plan and put the people in places to do it. This can be: A software developer failing to empathize with someone in the c suite and understanding the direction the project needed to go in to be considered a successful project The c suite failing to empathize with the development team in terms of understanding what skills and abilities they are offering and what resources and direction needed to be given to them to properly convey their goals Failures of the dev team or executives to empathize with their users in order to create a thing that is actually wanted in a way that will actually be used. Failures of technical teams to empathize with budgetary and business concerns and the reverse. All sorts of other failures between people in the middle to empathize in terms of being able to understand priorities and goals and allocate energy accordingly and understand the hierarchy among those goals. Failures within a dev team to empathize with each other leading to all sorts of various breakdowns. People are generally not very good at mapping out complex webs of incentives and goals and the ability to empathize is what underlies that in my opinion. I've sat in on an absurd number of projects where whatever silly stuff they thought was their roadblock was so far away from what was meaningful to the higher level goals of the project that they were absolutely doomed from the start. You can have projects like that go on for years in enterprises where they never even get on a viable path to creating anything productive. It generally ends up as some sort of battleground for internal politics in that case. At the end of the day, the ability to think in terms of hierarchical goals and incentives and escape the concerns of your personal silo is a majority of the time what could avoid this in my opinion.

>most project failures I see are failures of empathy That is quite the statement. Would you provide some examples of situations that made you come to this conclusion?

watwut 6y ago

Lack of empathy toward user/client made him replace us. Real story. Lack of empathy toward programmers led to imppssible schedule. Real story. Lack of empathy between team members who were supposed to lead cause spectacular dysfunction of team I am in right now.

anm89 6y ago

Very few software projects in my experience fail because they were too technically difficult and/or that the people involved were incapable of working through some technical problem. When I say failures of empathy, I'm not even saying that that was the failure of a single person to empathize, but that at the end of the day the collective parties could not understand enough about what all the other parties needed to create an actionable plan and put the people in places to do it. This can be: A software developer failing to empathize with someone in the c suite and understanding the direction the project needed to go in to be considered a successful project The c suite failing to empathize with the development team in terms of understanding what skills and abilities they are offering and what resources and direction needed to be given to them to properly convey their goals Failures of the dev team or executives to empathize with their users in order to create a thing that is actually wanted in a way that will actually be used. Failures of technical teams to empathize with budgetary and business concerns and the reverse. All sorts of other failures between people in the middle to empathize in terms of being able to understand priorities and goals and allocate energy accordingly and understand the hierarchy among those goals. Failures within a dev team to empathize with each other leading to all sorts of various breakdowns. People are generally not very good at mapping out complex webs of incentives and goals and the ability to empathize is what underlies that in my opinion. I've sat in on an absurd number of projects where whatever silly stuff they thought was their roadblock was so far away from what was meaningful to the higher level goals of the project that they were absolutely doomed from the start. You can have projects like that go on for years in enterprises where they never even get on a viable path to creating anything productive. It generally ends up as some sort of battleground for internal politics in that case. At the end of the day, the ability to think in terms of hierarchical goals and incentives and escape the concerns of your personal silo is a majority of the time what could avoid this in my opinion.