Projects, jobs don't always turn out great. Sometimes these just fall down to pieces. Most people will be somewhat surprised, even though there were some clear signs of pending failure before. The most common red flags are below. Make sure you are safely out of the way when you notice these things around you...
1) The Town Hall meeting. Usually hosted by upper level management for the general workforce, given at the biggest conference room in the neighbourhood of the office. This is the moment where big strategic announcements are made, an IPO, layoffs, change of leadership or ownership, new investments or ways of working. Often if not always attendance is mandatory.
Now Town Hall meetings are quite useful under normal circumstances. But start worrying if the frequency of Town Hall meetings exceed once per quarter. That means senior management has no control over the proceedings, changes its opinions and plans a lot, and makes hasty ill-advised decisions. Open communication is one things. Looking like you can't make up your mind is something else.
2) Time is a precious commodity, of which free there's little. At the job it seems we always run out of it, and we always need more. To argue why we need it, we make plans, do estimates and try to make it with minute-by-minute activity scripts. As a general rule though, time is always short, and everything needs to be faster and arrive more quickly.
However it is our great delusion to think our time the most important in the world. The great red flag on projects is when people deem a minute of their time more precious than the Pope's or the President's. When lunch breaks are capped to 15 minutes. When you must start work at 8:00 and continue until 18:00 - not a second more, not a second less. I'm very sorry guys, but unless you work in an Emergency Room, for the armed forces or in the space program, time cannot be the most critical thing for you. Your time is certainly not more important than theirs. Not every second you lose is a life-and-death situation.
So if all people start budgeting their time and yours on the job like it is the last drop of water in the desert, be afraid. Be very afraid.
3) Too many changes of leadership. Town Hall meetings are usually where important decisions are broadcasted, including leadership changes. Now leadership changes are sometimes necessary. People might rally behind new ideas of the new lead, freshen things up a bit and perhaps allow some rough diamonds to shine through. Like in sports, sometimes the new leadership places some different emphases, which in turn lead to success.
More often than not leadership changes don't really achieve quick tangible results. Leaders need time to forge their path, and as you see from red flag #2, time is not something many of us will be blessed with. So leadership changes begets more leadership changes, simply because the desired immediate results were not met.
So if your department suffers one change, that may be quite alright. If you suffer about one per month, something is going very wrong.
4) Politicking. Quite simply, if people are preoccupied with something other than the goal, than you are not getting the optimal results. In fact, it might be extremely dangerous as politicking can actually damage the success of the job or the project beyond repair. Because of politicking you might be drawn to spend time (there it is again) on something that is of no value to the goal itself, only to serve somebody else's agenda. It might be creating meaningless diagrams, about non-relevant data. It might be running errands just to look busy. It might be making fun of a colleague during a critical status update meeting.
A department in which politics supersede the actual production or the completion of the job, that's a red flag.
5) Giving indicators more worth than they have. Any project or job deserves to be judged fairly and its progress measured accurately. The metrics to use are difficult to relate to what's actually going on at the factory level, but more often than not, correlation is definitely there.
However if your department or project takes indicators more seriously than they are, you enter the realm of the weird. You start manipulating numbers to make them look good. You start behaving and taking action in such a way that the numbers get improved artificially. In some shape of form, this behaviour correlates with #4, you simply don't want to look bad on paper.
If your project takes more care of its numbers than it understands its meaning, then your project is in trouble. Red Flag.
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