Not Removing People From AProject

From Ed Yourdon's book, "Decline & Fall of the American Programmer"

By contrast, some organizations make a point of not removing people from a project team if they are performing poorly. Tomoo Matsubara, one of Japan's most respected software engineers, describes a policy at Hitachi Software Engineering [1]:

This ["don't-withrdraw"] policy may sound a little strange to Westerners, I suppose, but it is our long-standing policy that "an individual who has participated in a project from the initial stages should not be removed from the project even if it flounders because of his slopppy design or code or because of his mistakes." We have a notion that people's experience will accumulate only if they complete their work and observe the results of their ideas during development. If they leave the project in the midst of development, it becomes a negative experience becuase of resignation, frustration, or heartbreaking mentality. This policy also applies to key people on the project team, and I believe it nurtures many skilled people from project and technical management.

[1] Matsubara, Tomoo. "Project Management in Japan," American Programmer, June 1991.

-- JoshuaKerievsky - 01 Oct 2004