In a galaxy far away, in the planet Bogus, a person named Jamie was hired by the BOAT Corporation, a

software development company whose flagship product is HELEN, a client/server package that allows the
merchants of coaxium to register how much of the material they have and how many credits they have
received, to know how much they owe to the Trade Federation as taxes. HELEN is a gargantuan piece of
software that took more hours to develop than the Death Star.

Jamie joined a team of expert developers that used a recently discovered technology called Jabba, which
enabled the creation of web applications. Their mission was clear: users were becoming bored of the old
client/server version, so the team had to create a web version called WHELEN. Jamie’s team leader was
Sorman, a high-degree master Jedi whose knowledge of Jabba was beyond imagination. Sorman’s vision
was to build the new web application from the ground-up using only in-house code, despising third-party
components that were readily available to harness most of the hard work. Early on the project, Jamie and
the rest of the team were quite aware that this strategy wouldn’t work. She decided to talk privately with
Sorman about these objections once at lunchtime.

“This urge for purity won’t take us anywhere, time is running out and we still haven’t produced anything
of value” stated Jamie.

But Sorman’s will was unbreakable, “WHELEN is meant to be immaculate, untainted, uncontaminated. If
you question my decisions, you are not only an insubordinate: you are also a rebel against the Jedi faith,
remember that purity is the root of the Force”, he said.

“And, on top of that, BOAT has already spent millions of credits in it”, remarked Sorman.

Although Sorman’s strategy was simple and clear, it was such a huge burden on the team’s back that no
significant progress was made in the first two years. When the project was approaching its third year
without significant advance, Flint, BOAT’s CEO, was unsurprisingly upset by the lack of results from
Sorman’s team, so he decided to fire Sorman. Besides, almost all team members had already resigned,
only Jamie remained on BOAT (she needed the credits: she had her five children in planet Mogus).

Flint made some internal changes trying to save the project WHELEN. There was already a team in BOAT
that was working on Rocket, a non-critical project that was based on the same Jabba programming
language. Flint decided to use the Rocket team to also develop WHELEN and put Jamie in charge of the
team, but without relieving her of her duties as a developer. Jamie objected the Rocket team’s overload
and her own disproportionate and conflicting responsibilities, but Flint argued that he had no choice: the
shareholders had given him an ultimatum, his continuity as CEO depended on the success of WHELEN.
After some discussion, Jamie managed to reach an agreement with Flint: of the ten members of the Rocket
team, five would stay in the Rocket project and five would be transferred to WHELEN under Jamie’s
command.

In view of the circumstances, Jamie decided to bite the bullet and tried to make the best from the
situation. The Rocket team was a firmly established group in BOAT - they had worked together for almost
six years, and the team members had been almost the same all that time. Besides, they had an identity
quite different from Jamie’s: they were Kortians from planet Dogus, and their distrust for Mogusians like
Jamie was known in all the Galaxy. She tried to go along with them anyway, sharing some time and some
stories outside of the workplace, which open some space for discussion about what to do with the
WHELEN mess.
The main decision was whether they were going to continue in the same line of work that had been
followed under Sorman’s rule, or if they should go back to square one. Some other alternatives were
considered, like looking for some “code translator” that could create Jabba web pages from the code
already existing in the old version of HELEN, but this option was rapidly discarded due to its high risks and
unknown complexity. Some sort of consensus was reached in that the code already developed was not
useful in any way, so the final decision was to build it all again but using as many pre-built components as
possible to minimize the effort needed to reach the goal.

Jamie and her team also agreed on asking for some external help. They saw the “isolationist” style of
Sorman as an obstacle and as one of the factors that determined the failure of his strategy. Although
HELEN had evolved for more than twenty years and it was a rather stable and robust piece of software, it
surely had bugs and some “erratic behaviors” which, added to the ever-changing taxing rules of the
Federation, created a necessity in BOAT of maintain an army of over thirty maintenance engineers. HELEN
had been developed using the Hutt programing language, which was older than the Republic and, in these
days, only a few coders knew all its intricacies. Some of them had worked in BOAT since its beginnings and
had a very valuable knowledge about the cryptic accounting rules of the Federation, quite a valuable
knowledge, and Jamie knew it, so she decided to contact Jon, the leader of the HELEN team, and asked
him for access to HELEN’s code and some instruction about its functionality and capabilities. Much to her
surprise, Jon was quite uncooperative. He gave Jamie an old version of HELEN’s code arguing that “many
features are still on test”, and as for the explanation of the system he only gave Jamie a copy of the user
manual. After thinking about it for a while, it was all clear in Jamie’s mind: they are not interested in
helping the project that will make their work obsolete.

As if this were not enough, Flint began to decimate the already precarious WHELEN team. To show some
“results” and realizing that WHELEN was not going to deliver any significant result in at least another year,
he began to assign some tasks to the team in some “fast” projects to appease the fears of the
shareholders. A few months after Jamie decided to take the WHELEN project in her hands, the team had
been reduced to two people: one test practitioner and herself. At this point, Jamie feels that it is time to
decide whether there’s something she can do to make things work, or if her sanity is worth this Death
March.

Supplemental material

Summary of characters

• Jamie: a software developer with some experience as team leader

• Sorman: an expert developer with incredible skills
• Flint: CEO of the BOAT Corporation
• Jon: leader of the HELEN team in the BOAT Corporation
• Members of the Rocket team, an internal project in the BOAT Corporation

Learning objectives

• Understand some traps that teams face in decision making

• Perceive the importance of context in teamwork
 • Understand advocacy and inquiry
• Appreciate the importance of diversity
• Negotiation
• Group development

Key terms with definitions

• Status quo trap: when the old HELEN team is uncooperative because they fear that WHELEN will
affect their interests
• Sunk-costs trap: when Sorman argues that the WHELEN project should continue
• Multiple alternatives: when Jamie and the team are considering scenarios to continue the
WHELEN proyect
• Framing: when Flint frames the cancellation of the WHELEN project as a threat
• Multiple sequence models of group development: when Jamie is trying to get along with the
Rocket team and, at the same time, they are trying to perform at making decisions
• Diversity: how Jamie deals with mistrust that stems from her team having a different identity
than her own
• Systems: most of the team’s problems come from the system (the BOAT Corporation)
• Advocacy: how Sorman argues that the WHELEN project should continue
• Inquire: how Jamie asks the team about how to continue with the WHELEN project
• Group norms: seeking an outside opinion before making a final decision when the WHELEN
team decides to ask for help from the HELEN team

Discussion questions

• What negotiation strategies or good practices could have Jamie used with Sorman to make him
change his design vision?
• How could Flint have used his influence and power to obtain a better outcome from the
WHELEN project?
• What strategies can Jamie use to turn the HELEN team into an ally and not an obstacle?
• What could have done Jamie to avoid the WHELEN team to be decimated by Flint?