Other people's code

A good read from Thomas Lewis from Mix Online.

http://www.visitmix.com/Opinions/Why-Does-Your-Code-or-Design-Suck

I love the drive-by tweet metaphor from the article...it's so true. And not necessarily just from the design side; it's apparent in engineering, too. From a project management side, this can be quite harmful to a project since the shared goals of delivering on time and making a happy customer can bring unneeded chaos for the project and its team members. My way or the highway just can't cut it in all situations. This is especially true if you're bringing on new team mebers into a project. You can't break down the walls and start over - there's simply no funds for this scenario.

As a PM, create positive outcomes for the project by preventing OPC-syndrome by way of a few must-have's;

1. Brief the onboarding team members as to why they've been assigned the project, what are their goals, their mission, and what framework do they need to work within to assure project success. This is not always "perfect" success, but we have to ship software, right, and budget doesn't grow on trees, especially in a consulting org.
2. Bring the correct resources into the project to perform the work. Tasking an Integrator to define a better UX metaphor will only disenchant the creative team - that's their job!
3. A senior developer needs to establish and lay down the application's architecture - don't expect devs to be happy if they're being tasked to super clue fixtures to a solution. On the flipside, we can't afford to overarchitect some fixtures for the sake of ego - ego my Eggo.
4. Critique and feedback is welcome from within, just be sure it's well organized and not flung hapzaxzzardly to the team - the peanut gallery can get ugly. Put a forcing function to funnel feedback through someone so the trivial pieces are diverted from the team. And raraly in a UI/UX driven project is there sufficient time to sit back and iterate and iterate on the deliverable. So, there may be a week left till final delivery when the completed experience is put together. Encourage the team, and take the flaming arrows with your trusty shield. Conversely, don't ignore internal feedback altogether. That's not my suggestion - working peer relationships only strengthen through listening and learning.