"Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way
that is superior to not measuring it at all."
"As a general rule of them, when benefits are not quantified at all, assume there aren’t any." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable
deadlines. They don’t think about their action in such terms; they think
rather that what they’re doing is throwing down an interesting challenge
to their workers, something to help them strive for excellence."
"Most of us managers are prone to one failing: A tendency to manage people as though they were modular components." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond
together into a cooperative team."
"People under time pressure don’t work better - they
just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the
quality of the product and of their own work experience."
"Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after
they’ve done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the
manager did it without even consulting them." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister,
"Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"[The common definition of estimate is] 'the most optimistic prediction that has a non-zero probability of coming true' [...] Accepting this definition leads irrevocably toward a method called what's-the-earliest-date-by-which-you-can't-prove-you-won't-be-finished estimating" (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"The major problems of our work are not so much technological
as sociological in nature. Most managers are willing to concede the idea that
they’ve got more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom
manage that way. They manage as though technology were their principal concern.
They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting
puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves
were going to do the work rather than manage it. […] The main reason we tend to
focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because
it’s more crucial, but because it’s easier to do."
"The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies ('My people are too dumb to build systems without them') and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part
of management. Strong managers don’t care when team members cut their hair or
whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff’s
accomplishments."
"The obsession with methodologies in the workplace is another instance of the high-tech illusion. It stems from the belief that what really matters is the technology. [...] Whatever the technological advantage may be, it may come only at the price of a significant worsening of the team's sociology." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal
alignment."
"The [software] builders’ view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than what the market requires and is willing to pay for." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic."(Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams", 1987)
"Whether you call it a 'team' or an 'ensemble' or a 'harmonious work group' is not what matters; what matters is helping all
parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to
the success of the whole."
"Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody’s business." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"And the management team is not really a team. A team is a
group of people who have joint responsibility for - and joint ownership of - one or
more work products. People who own nothing in common may be called a team, but
they aren’t. This is not to say that companies never form real management
teams, only that they do so rarely. Most of what are called management teams
are a mockery of the team concept."
"Authoritarian management is obsessed with time. It is
destructive of slack and inclined to goad people into outperforming their
peers. And it makes learning impossible."
"Change always implies abandonment. What you're abandoning is an old way of doing things. You're abandoning it because it's old, because time has made it no longer the best way. But it is also (again because it's old) a familiar way. And more important, it is an approach that people have mastered. So the change you are urging upon your people requires them to abandon their mastery of the familiar, and to become novices once again, to become rank beginners at something with self-definitional importance." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"Each time you add automation, you choose some particularly
mechanical component of the work (that’s what makes it a good candidate for
automation). When the new automation is in place, there is less total work to
be done by the human worker, but what work is left is harder. That is the
paradox of automation: It makes the work harder, not easier. After all, it was
the easy stuff that got absorbed into the machine, so what’s left is, almost by
definition, fuzzier, less mechanical, and more complex. Whatever standard is
now introduced to govern the work will dictate (often in elaborate detail) how
the few remaining mechanical aspects are to be performed."
"Growth is the rising tide that floats all boats. The period
of growth is one in which people are naturally less change-resistant. It is
therefore the optimal time to introduce any change. Specifically, changes that
are not growth-related should be timed to occur during growth periods. This is
not because they are strictly necessary then, but because they are more likely
to be possible then. You need that advantage going up against Goliath."
"How people feel can be more a factor in the success of a change than what they think. Anxiety of any kind can only complicate the task of change introduction. That’s why the period of sudden decline of corporate fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, perhaps shocked by the vitality of the competition. In retrospect, a far better time to introduce the change would have been back in the period of healthy growth. Growth always carries with it a certain necessity for change. You may have to hire more people, expand to larger quarters, diversify or centralize, all to accommodate your own burgeoning success. But growth feels good; it feels like winning. It even feels good enough to reduce the amount of change resistance." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels
talk about the schedule being 'aggressive', or even 'highly aggressive'. In my
experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or
highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. 'Aggressive schedule', I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase - understood implicitly by all
involved - for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met."
"Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient
power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient
power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines
leadership."
"Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your
agenda. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some
short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to
increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all
tend to be short-term thinkers."
"Management is hard, and not because there is so much work to do (an overworked manager is almost certainly doing work he/she shouldn’t be doing). Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you."
"Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept
some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to
increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all
tend to be short-term thinkers."
"Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure. It tries to avoid all chance of failure by having key decisions made by a guru class (those who set the standards) and carried out mechanically by the regular folk. As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in
a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes
quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really
Quality Reduction Programs in disguise."
"Risk management is the explicit quantitative declaration of uncertainty. But in some corporate cultures, people aren’t allowed to be uncertain. They’re allowed to be wrong, but they can’t be uncertain. They are obliged to look their bosses and clients in the face and lie rather than show uncertainty about outcomes. Uncertainty is for wimps.
"Risk mitigation is the set of actions you will take to
reduce the impact of a risk should it materialize. There are two
not-immediately-obvious aspects to risk mitigation: The plan has to precede
materialization. Some of the mitigation activities must also precede
materialization."
"Significant organizational learning can’t happen in
isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle
managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to
each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common
boss."
"Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"The premise here is that the hierarchy lines on the chart are also the only communication conduit. Information can flow only along the lines. [...] The hierarchy lines are paths of authority. When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that's a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn’t make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you’re risk-averse, you won’t do it. And that’s a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"There is no such thing as 'healthy' competition within a
knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of
our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge
work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited
to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well
between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to."
"When a schedule is not met, those inclined to pass out blame
are quick to point at the lowest-level workers; they reason that performance is
the domain entirely of those who perform the work. They ask plaintively, 'Why
can’t these guys ever meet their schedules?' The answer that the schedule might
have been wrong in the first place only befuddles them. It’s as though they
believe there is no such thing as a bad schedule, only bad performances that
resulted in missing the scheduled date. There is such a thing as a bad
schedule. A bad schedule is one that sets a date that is subsequently missed.
That’s it. That’s the beginning and the end of how a schedule should be judged.
If the date is missed, the schedule was wrong. It doesn’t matter why the date
was missed. The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that
is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan. The missed schedule
indicts the planners, not the workers."
"When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that’s a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath." (Tom DeMarco, "Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency", 2001)
"When managers are overworked, they’re doing something other
than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real
management gets done.
"Whether this person is a designer, product manager,
programmer, writer, consultant, or whatever, he/she comes with (1) a set of
skills and (2) some explicit knowledge of the area in which skills are to be
deployed. The skills alone aren’t enough. Domain knowledge is also required.
The more important that domain knowledge is, the less fungible the people are.
That means you can’t divide them up into pieces, but it also means that you
can’t easily replace them with other people when they leave."
"If you've been in the software business for any time at all,
you know that there are certain common problems that plague one project after
another. Missed schedules and creeping requirements are not things that just
happen to you once and then go away, never to appear again. Rather, they are
part of the territory. We all know that. What's odd is that we don't plan our
projects as if we knew it. Instead, we plan as if our past problems are locked
in the past and will never rear their ugly heads again. Of course, you know
that isn't a reasonable expectation."
"Risks and benefits always go hand in hand. The reason that a
project is full of risk is that it leads you into uncharted waters. It
stretches your capability, which means that if you pull it off successfully,
it's going to drive your competition batty. The ultimate coup is to stretch
your own capability to a point beyond the competition's ability to respond.
This is what gives you competitive advantage and helps you build a distinct
brand in the market."
"The business of believing only what you have a right to believe is called risk management." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects", 2003)
"The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed." (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, "Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects", 2003)
"There is probably no job on earth for which an ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast is more of a requirement than software project management."
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