Susan is a developer on a large team writing applications for a major financial institution – She's frustrated. Her portion of the application has to interface with a third-party service that handles check images and imports the associated account information from partner banks that are cashing their checks. Susan has been coding for fifteen years and eats C# for breakfast, but her work items are making no progress. No one will tell her what the incoming data schema looks like and while she has been reporting to the team that she is not getting anywhere, neither the project manager nor the application architect have given her the information she needs to complete this portion of the solution. Tired of banging her head against a wall and feeling useless, she daydreams to a time when life was simpler.

Back in the third grade, she had pigtails and everyone insisted upon calling her Suzie even though she hated it. This was an exceptional day; the sun was shining and the schoolyard called to the class, beckoning them to play kickball. The only thing between the children and red rubber madness was a math quiz.

"Class, please take out your #2 pencils and we can begin the multiplication quiz," announced Ms. Brown.

Suzie reached into her desk, pulled out her favorite pencil (Black Warrior #2! No Ticonderoga for Susie), and began the test. About ten minutes into the test… <<SNAP>>

"Oh no!" thought Susie as she tried to jam the broken pieces back together to at least have something useable. She stared at the paper futilely angry at the pencil for being broken wondering how something so horrible could happen to her. She didn't want to get into trouble disrupting the class by telling the teacher or walking to the pencil sharpener and she certainly didn't want to be accused of cheating by rummaging around inside her desk looking for another one.

"Class, please pass your tests forward, to be collected."

Suzie's heart sank in her chest and she felt sick. She'd spent so much time worrying about the problem and blaming the tools that she didn't get anything done at all. The bell rang, but Suzie didn't much feel like playing as not even kickball would make her feel good about that quiz.

Recognizing the Problem

Dealing with Broken Pencil Syndrome (BPS) is almost a daily occurrence on many large projects. Any time that there are multiple people working together on something that must intricately fit together or that has to interoperate with external systems, BPS can set in. This can happen at a systemic level affecting the whole team, but usually it is confined to individual work items. This can usually be fixed quite easily, but when they affect the critical path, the results can be disastrous.

When working through an issue it is important to ask yourself a few questions to make sure that you're not a victim of Broken Pencil Syndrome:

1. Have you begun to blame your tools for a lack of progress or success? Even a bad violin in the hands of Vengerov will sound better than if you'd handed me a Stradivarius.
2. Do you feel like you'd be able to get your task done if someone would just tell you what to do or answer a question for you?
3. Have you been communicating the same lack of progress with the same impediment for more than one reporting cycle?
4. Do you have a problem with no plan of attack or path to get to a solution?
5. Do you feel like the task is wildly out of control making you feel helpless to the point where it is affecting you outside of work?

 Getting Your Groove Back

As I am sure you can imagine, the effects of BPS are larger than just the immediate project impacts. It can work against general productivity by lowering team morale, leaking into personal lives, and making your team look bad to clients and customers. There are a number of things you can do, however, to recognize the problem early and resolve the root cause:

• Make sure that communication channels are open and that the appropriate questions are being asked. Often times, team members will simply state that they are working on an issue. Without additional detail to identify the specific roadblocks, BPS can go unnoticed. Managers must make an effort to delve into the details of the issue, while team members must have enough trust in the team as a whole to be able to candidly share problems. Surfacing issues early and openly can usually avoid hard stops to progress.
  
• Objectively look at your toolset. There are many great reasons to look at better, more efficient tools. Generally, though, this is something that should be done at a more strategic level so that impacts to retraining, budget, regression testing, and product support can be handled appropriately. Again, this comes to effective communication. More experienced team members have usually found ways to work with tools' limitations and might even be able identify team members straying from best practices through this kind of discussion.
  
• Some managers see the Management by Walking around (MBWA) as a way to stay out of the details. This can't be further from the truth! Every interaction with a colleague is an opportunity to ask the right questions and delve into the challenges that they are facing. If every interaction consists of an affirmation that everything is going swimmingly, the wrong questions are being asked or there is a fundamental trust problem involved. (Ignoring this is Broken Pencil Syndrome on the part of the manager or lead.)
  
• In every case, make sure that you have a plan of attack. Wasting time worrying about the problem or playing the "woe is me" game only eats up time that could be spent getting out of the situation. Formulate a plan and communicate it to the rest of the team so that you can be supported. Who knows, someone might have an existing solution in the can. If you are truly stuck with no next steps in mind, it is time to escalate the problem immediately to build an attack stratagem.
  
• Don't Panic! Communicate.