Matrix management AND management by consensus… winning combination right there. I'm surprised they didn't throw in some "business process re-engineering" just for kicks!

In my department the matrix thing actually worked, but that's only because my direct manager was smart enough to reduce the priority of my work for him to "when you have time, if ever" when I got assigned to a different project. The company had pools of specialists and when a project came along management would form a project team from the various pools.

The culture of consensus was what really killed things though. It absolutely paralyzed development. I'm fairly sure it came about from a history of people getting fired for sticking their necks out and taking risks. As a result, everyone circled the wagons with the theory that if consensus if achieved then nobody can be held individually responsible for any decision and the company certainly wouldn't fire the whole team. The problem was, of course, that it took forever to get anything done.

With the risk taking there is a definite difference between doing something actually stupid and making a calculated risk decision based on all the info you have at the time. The problem was, was that the company's upper management couldn't seem to tell the difference between the two…or at least that's how it looked from the bottom.