Here’s someone you’ll come to meet once or twice in your career – the Project Hoard.
The Project Hoard implies exactly what it is – someone who hoards all the projects for themselves.
All the development, architecture, design, deployment tasks that are critical to the project being a success, they take it all on, they own it all, they can’t let any of it go, they can’t trust anyone to do it as well as they can, they have to keep it all.
And here is the result, every time.
They will not deliver on time, they will be late and the project will fail.
And the Project Hoard will blame everyone except themselves.
I’m not sure why this mentality exists, perhaps it’s from fear or mistrust of others. In most cases the Project Hoard is pretty harmless, they want to own their little corner of the world and share it with no one. In the worst case, they are the ones leading the project and keeping everything for themselves in an attempt to show all the work they are doing.
In either case, it’s not worth it to fight with them, a better use of your time is moving on to where people want your help, recognize your contributions and realize how critical you are to the timely delivery and success of their project.
You can choose which projects you work on (but no one is telling you).
