Development teams become non-participants - Instead of challenging poorly scoped projects and badly-estimated timelines, developers just accept what we give them. They end up consistently working long hours into the evenings and weekends to the point of burnout.

Instead of challenging poorly scoped projects and badly-estimated timelines, developers just accept what we give them. They end up consistently working long hours into the evenings and weekends to the point of burnout. Development teams start rooting for our failure - Instead of questioning our solutions and our design decisions, developers just "do as they're told". They keep their valuable feedback to themselves knowing what they're being asked to build is going to ultimately fail

- Instead of questioning our solutions and our design decisions, developers just "do as they're told". They keep their valuable feedback to themselves knowing what they're being asked to build is going to ultimately fail Development teams stop caring - Instead of building the best solution possible, developers will start building to the letter of what you've scoped. When we discover that what we have built doesn't go far enough to solve a pain for our client, developers will throw their hands up and say "Not my problem. We build what you tell us to build."

At the end of the day, no one is happy. Every team we work with ends up pointing fingers at each other.

So how do we solve this? For me, it's a really simple thing: Developers are people just like us. If we care about the work we do, wouldn't it make sense that our colleagues in development would care as well? If everyone cares about the work we do for our clients, then why are we so often treating developers as tools rather than colleagues that deserve an equal voice when we start planning a solution?

To really tackle the problem, we really have to listen to the meta-level feedback -- criticisms not about the projects we work on, but the fundamentals of how we work on projects in general. Dissecting the breakdowns in the way we do our work, it's important to keep in mind 3 things:

Development Should Be Involved In the Entire Process - Not Just The Output

Professional Services teams are often frustrated when they're brought in at the end of the sales process. Our common refrain is: "If we were a part of the sales process, we wouldn't be committing to something that we cannot deliver".