IT pilot fish is called in to a project meeting with four other analysts — and it’s clear right away that this isn’t going well.

“The project was to make an application similar to one that had been supported by one of the team members for 16 years,” says fish. “Barney, the programmer in the group, was making an impassioned argument that the database design needed to be normalized like all other databases are.

“But Betty, the person supporting the system, was against doing that. She made a very good argument for keeping it the same, based on reporting needs and the way the system worked.”

After both team members make their cases, the others turn to fish and ask, “What should we do?”

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