5 Visible symptoms of bad project management in IT

I think there are many, but, the below 5 are the easiest to recognise:

1. Politically correct team meetings
The whole team claps for the "best employee of the month", everybody agrees to work harder for the customer and to improve the customer satisfaction index.

• No open thread-bare discussion happens on the last escalation/schedule slippage/fire fighting.
• No meeting agenda
• Team goals are not clear
• No action items with responsibility, accountability & deadlines (esp. a strong NO to follow-ups)

2. Huge gap between estimation and execution
Classic example of this would be:

• Why did 3 guys slog it out in the weekend? 
• Because we had some "production issues" and next version release in the week. 
• Wasn't this known when the project started? 
• How many times has this happened before and what did we learn from it? 
• How are we ensuring that this doesn't happen again?

3. "Perennial resource constraint" because wrong people are doing the wrong job


4. Inability to distinguish between good and bad developers

• Number of hours billed & lines of code typed become indicators of capability
• The best and the laggards are treated equally. 
• No chance given to either to improve further. 
• This often leads to the good ones leaving when the first opportunity is available.

5. Religious adherence to processes and templates at the expense of..... well everything else

•  The whole work stops when we have a time-sheet/audit report/"process enhancement document" to fill.
• Good leadership requires a healthy disregard for processes that are bureaucratic & the ones that don't achieve the goals of the organisation in the correct manner.

Are these happening in your team?