Reading Bob Schaefer’s "Rapid Results" and listening to a conversation over the cubical wall the other day I was struck by an interesting observation. Rapid results projects are dependant for their success to a high degree on the people working on the project. To be blunt, if you have a moron working on the project, it slows the progess of the project to that person’s speed. They fall onto the critical path because it takes them longer to complete tasks than a normal human.
Now this is compounded by the old adage that "none of us is dumber than all of us." In other words, left on our own we tend to do the right thing. In groups we make decisions based on comprimises and therefore never arrive at anyones optimal solution, but a solution that everyone is willing to live with.
Add to this peoples willingness to put up with the mundane status quo rather than adopting an attitude that change is good, and we’ve pretty much isolated all of the factors that are going to drive a rapid results initiative off the rails.
