You can't help but smile. This post rings so true that I doubt anyone could say that they have never experienced any of these issues. We have strategies to deal with each one and they are working for us. Pet projects are straightforward. We allow employees time for their own research and experimentation but we own the IPR if they come up with something cool. We deal with noisy customers by proactively managing projects through agile sprints and pay attention to ensuring we are transparent and communicate thoroughly. We tackle noisy employees through our recruitment process. We spend time making sure potential employees fit our values and culture. We call it "the four behaviours" and we work to ensure a good fit. In that way we avoid the noisy employee problem. If we make a mistake we deal with the issue head on but we have found that our culture is self healing so the odd balls are usually squeezed out by the rest of the team.

I look forward to reading your next post.

Peter