In my division, employees are essentially on call 24/7. We do a good amount of fire-fighting (in other words, responding to emergencies that come up and are unpredictable). There is a tendency to ignore issues that are not pressing until they become urgent. There has been improvement in this area--planning and abiding by schedules in the face of interruptions and emergencies--in the ten years I have been with the division, but when push comes to shove the old habits resurface. Some of this may be due to chronic understaffing, but with the build-up of teams in India, the understaffing is less of a problem. We try to be very responsive to customers, but as the pool of customers in our case consists of a small number of large customers, being customer-driven can lead to sudden changes in priorities and feature creep into products and development cycles. It's been suggested that rather than be so customer-focused and driven, we should lead the way in product development and innovation so that customers will want the products we develop, but we don't seem to be able to do that. It has also been the case that management will try to promote good practices by training everyone in some new method (of time management or work planning), but after the initial push, the effort is abandoned and management support for the new methods seems to vanish. We are schedule-driven no matter how unrealistic the schedule, and it's only when the true scope of the work becomes impossible to ignore that schedules (with management, with the customer) get renegotiated and start to resemble reality. The problem is always one of how to meet a very aggressive deadline.
