If enough big things go wrong, everyone becomes incompetent. Everyone gets ugly. People quit. Despair rose. Managers stormed out of meetings and heavy things were thrown across boardrooms. Months flew by and therapy bills rose. As other parts of the project were completed, we tried not to notice the gaping Channels-shaped black hole at our center, slowly pulling everything inside.I remember Channels well. I never used it, and always disabled it immediately, and occasionally it would reappear again. It was intrusively annoying, much like Windows Messenger now.
Bad projects take on a life of their own, and even good people can get taken down by them. We like to believe that good project and team management and solid developers prevent or overcome bad projects, but that's often not true. Bad things happen to good people all the time.
Everyone, to a person, will end up working on a fair number of bad projects in their careers. In some cases, there's nothing you can do about them -- except learn from them. Figure out what made them bad, understand the warning signs, and consider what might have made a difference.
From reading Berkun, I get the sense he does this very well, which make his Microsoft anecdotes very powerful.
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