Rotating Leadership Successfully: 1 Project, 2½ years, And 8 Different Project Managers

Most leadership teams feel they need to make a fundamental choice between being a people-oriented organization or a process-oriented organization. Both philosophies bring their own benefits and challenges into play as the organization works to achieve its mission. However, there is another way. The author's experience is that one can build consistent, straightforward processes that facilitate and encourage people to work collaboratively to solve problems, thereby gaining the best of both worlds. This paper describes a two and a half year, 48,000+ hour software development endeavor at Menlo Innovations that was led by a series of eight different project managers.