In every project there comes a time when everything seems to slow down and not quite stop. Like taking a nap when you have half a hangover - you don’t really sleep and you don’t really heal. You just slow down and stretch out your misery.

I have never really had a good explanation for it. I’ve seen developers just run out of juice when under pressure, when ahead, when working on critical path stuff, when working on utilities. In other words, I’ve seen it across almost ever circumstance I can imagine.

Sometimes there are physical reasons and you can fix those.

Say build times are taking too long - hours or even overnight: buy a faster machine. Take a few days and re-arrange your code so it’s faster. Get people involved in fixing the problem.

Are your people tired? Hey, the excitement of the start is gone and the deadline isn’t close yet. Send ‘em home. Make people take a four day weekend. Go on a team hike.

Maybe your team has spent too much time together working on hard stuff. People can de-bond as easily as they bond. Maybe it’s skillset mismatch - Fred is stuck doing all the PHP and he wants to code Ajax for a while. Whatever. Your team leads should be paying attention to that stuff.

But sometimes it’s just not clear why it’s happening, or the things you try aren’t working. Well, you know I’m a fan of re-planning. Take a day or two and replan. It’s not like much work is getting done anyway!