How to survive a completely mismanaged project with terrible leadership
Incompetent leadership and forced, useless processes trap teams in a cycle of endless daily meetings and broken workarounds like manual file editing. This administrative overhead prevents actual work from getting done and leaves employees feeling helpless with no authorization to fix the underlying chaos.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Manually editing files before environment deployment
- 2Documenting processes and risks
- 3Escalating issues through risk and issue logs
- 4holding separate meetings after the official project manager meetings to actually get work done
- 5consultants and developers bypassing the project management layer to coordinate directly
- 6Asking detailed questions about existing accounting processes and audit history before accepting
- 7Passing on the offer to avoid potential operational chaos
- 8Evaluating whether mature accounting practices and good net assets reserves are already in place
- 9trying to go with the flow and not getting overly invested
- 10protecting your own sanity and letting them run in circles instead of pushing back
In their words
Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.
“I'm currently dealing with a shit show of a project and I learned these teams have bashed heads for a while now.”source ↗
“our qa test isn't actually testing what it should because we're manually editing files before each environment deployment.”source ↗
“Every person, manager, and department basically does things their own way, and the strongest voice moves the tide in that wave pool.”source ↗
“There is overlap in efforts and function, things are launched without review from others, decisions are changed between people without looping in others.”source ↗
“It is a nightmare we are not authorized to wake from or improve.”source ↗
“many nonprofits lean into the mission and aren’t as finance oriented, so it can be very operationally messy and the technical knowledge base isn’t there.”source ↗
“man that's a tough call. the mission pulling at your heartstrings while your brain is doing the math on work life balance going out the window”source ↗
“it can get incredibly messy very fast if there isn’t good processes in place for grant reporting and expense allocations.”source ↗
“The overlap in work is the part that would drive me mad, you got people burning hours on same thing because nobody loops each other in”source ↗
“To get shit done, we now have meetings after their meetings, with only the 2 operative employees, the 2 consultants and the developer and thats working perfect.”source ↗
“My colleague is already overworked and like many of us, hates that we know have 80% useless PM meetings daily and cant get shit done.”source ↗
“my Problem is, that i feel like most PMs dont know what they are doing, thinking they know it, or thinking way too much of themselves.”source ↗
Where this came up
People with this problem also raised
- 11How to deal with toxic leadership during company layoffs
- 3How to deal with a manager who is confidently wrong
- 5How do I deal with non-technical managers and constant interruptions?
- 2How to handle project management and coding at the same time
- 3Why does management give us arbitrary deadlines without explaining why?
- 2Why is Scrum being forced onto non-Agile teams?