Management Patterns

You've heard of Design Patterns ? Common solutions to common problems. With the buyout of my employer nearly a year ago I've been seeing lots of new policies and practices come into play, many that echo Dilbert and this got me thinking: Could you classify some comming management techiniques or procedures into Management Patterns ?

I came up with a few examples :

Powerpoint Zombie Pattern
Used by upper level branch management or corperate management to disseminate information to lower level employees. Primary characteristic of this pattern is that the audience of the presentation find less than 10% of the information relevant and less than 1% of it usefull or new.
The powerpoint zombie pattern tends to occur in companies with 100+ employees or smaller companies that have been bought out.

HipNTrendy Company Pattern
Most often found in small startups. The primary focus is this pattern is energy - do something new , get it to market fast. Be the next Google ! We don't use the old tired ways that other companies do things - they lack our imagination.
Recoginisable characteristics of this pattern include casual or no dresscodes, open door policies, lower "start-up" level wages and promises of big payouts when the company eventually gets sold. Frequently develops into the Growth Spurt pattern.


Growth Spurt
You've started out with the HipNTrendy pattern and got a product out that the customers love (you've probably also adopted the Bend Over pattern for at least one customer). You see demand increasing and decided to add more staff to support it .
Primary characteristics include : New staff turning up every pay cycle, new customers getting signed up every week, boundless optimism, sunny skies and world peace.

Bend Over Pattern
There's this customer that has the CEO's ear and their word is law. DB code failing and app losing financial data ? Too bad, ImportantCo needs their 100% critical icon justification fixed first. If there is one company (or several) for which your company will given in and fold faster than Superman on laundry day for then your management is implementing the Bend Over pattern.

Titanic Pattern
You've been taken over or merged ! Despite management proclaimations of a brave new era of opportunity you see people leaving left right and center. The coming together of the two companies has been like the coming together of the Titanic and the Iceberg (and you're not on the iceberg).
Primary characteristics include : New mouse mats, pens, policies and more meetings. Departmental calendars suddenly contain a lot of single day holidays and you see a lot more people leaving the room to take calls on their mobile. Less work gets done and more people leave until the whole thing gets outsourced. The iceberg drifts on....

Frankenstein Pattern
Keep peddling a product that should have been put down years ago. Instead of listening to developer pleas to start again or to recode bits that are old and decaying you have to coble new features, even merging totally incompatible products and features into your product. Whatever happens, do not kill the cash cow.
Primary characteristics include : Your software has inconsistant icons and even spelling across multiple screens or windows. Developers spend more time fixing bugs than creating new features. Unit test coverage is allowed to slip and the roadmap changes so fast it's not on a wiki but on a whiteboard.