Even when you have skilled, motivated, hard-working people, the wrong team structure can undercut their efforts instead of catapulting them to success. A poor team structure can increase development time, reduce quality, damage morale, increase turnover, and ultimately lead to project cancellation.
Motivation is undoubtedly the single greatest influence on how well people perform. Most productivity studies have found that motivation has a stronger influence on productivity than any other factor.
There are no secrets on an successful software project. Both good and bad news must be able to move up and down the ptoject hierarchy without restriction.
The default movement on a software project should be in the direction of taking elements of the software away to make it simpler rather than adding elements to make it more complex.