We had an interesting experience at the start of the year where people were being "encouraged" by the project managers not to be negative on the project. It fe

We had an interesting experience at the start of the year where people were being "encouraged" by the project managers not to be negative on the project. It felt like being part of the Chinese Cultural Revolution where everyone was getting over excited but with a foreboding sense of dread hanging in the background. Myself and a few others continued to list cautions (normally I'm the optimistic one - but this had gone past my limit) but were ignored and treated as naysayers. It resulted in us putting a country live on a production system without having completed regression testing for existing countries, done any negative testing, or having done any testing with security and workflow configured in a production like way. The next couple of months were absolute hell, and only now are we beginning to recover from it. That said, to get the system stable everyone went out of their way, working overtime/weekends without break or compensation to keep the project on track (and losing one of the team from the project due to stress), which allowed the project managers to say "see, putting you under pressure meant you got it to work", without seeing the chaos they'd caused. People should be encouraged to do realistic thinking - aim for the optimistic, don't say no before you try something (so long as it's not clearly suicidal), but when you know things are going wrong take time to reflect and reassess your situation.