Book by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister
- Chapter 1: Somewhere today, a project is failing
- Chapter 2: Make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger
- Chapter 3: Vienna waits for you
- Chapter 4: Quality - if time permits
- Chapter 5: Parkinson's Law revisited
- Chapter 6: Laetrile
- Chapter 7: The Furniture Police
- Chapter 8: You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5
- Chapter 9: Saving money on space
- Chapter 10: Brain Time versus Body Time
- Chapter 11: The Telephone
- Chapter 12: Bring Back the Door
- Chapter 13: Taking Umbrella Steps
- Chapter 14: The Hornblower Factor
- Chapter 15: Let's talk about Leadership
- Chapter 16: Hiring a Juggler
- Chapter 17: Playing well with others
- Chapter 18: Childhood's end
- Chapter 19: Happy to be here
- Chapter 20: Human Capital
- Chapter 21: The Whole is greater than the sum of the Parts
- Chapter 22: The Black Team
- Chapter 23: Teamicide
- Chapter 24: Teamicide Revisited
- Chapter 25: Competition
- Chapter 26: A spaghetti dinner
- Chapter 27: Open Kimono
- Chapter 28: Chemistry for Team Formation
- Chapter 29: The self-healing system
- Chapter 30: Dancing with Risk
- Chapter 31: Meetings, Monologues, and Conversations
- Chapter 32: The ultimate management sin is ...
- Chapter 33: E(vil) Mail
- Chapter 34: Making change possible
- Chapter 35: Organizational learning
- Chapter 36: The making of community
- Chapter 37: Chaos and Order
- Chapter 38: Free Electrons
- Chapter 39: Holgar Dansk
"Politics" is the most frequently cited cause of failure. "Politics" for people mean: communication problems, staffing problems, lack of motivation, and high turnover. English language provides a much more precise term - sociology.
The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
We tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work, because it is easier to do: new hard drive installation vs figuring out why somebody is dissatisfied with the company.
Manager should concentrate on sociology, not on technology. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of work.
The "make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger" mentality, can be fatal in your development area:
- Make the machine (the human machine) run as smoothly as possible
- Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job
- Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine
- Optimize the steady state
- Standardize procedure, do everything by the book
- Eliminate experimentation - that's what the folks at the headquarters are paid for
To manage thinking workers effectively, managers should take measures nearly opposite to those listed above:
- encourage people to make some errors - ask people what dead-end roads they have been down, and making sure they understand that "none" is not the best answer
- you may be able to kick the people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive and thoughtful, there is nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and has to be "supplemented" by the boss
- every worker is unique, uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective
- the catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux, someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work - managers pay too little attention to how well each team member fits into the effort as a whole
- workers need time for brainstorming, investigating new methods, figuring out how to avoid doing some subtasks, reading, training, and just goofing off
Your people are aware of the one short life that each person is allotted. There has to be something more important than the silly hob they are working on.
Overtime - for every hour of overtime, there will be more or less an hour of undertime. The trade-off might work to management's advantage in the short term, but in the long term it will cancel out.
Overtime is like sprinting: it makes some sense for the last 100m of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first kilometer, you are wasting time.
Workaholism is an illness, but common-cold-like, everyone has a bout of it now and then. If a manager tries to exploit workaholics, they will eventually lose them.
Realization that one has sacrificed a more important value (family, love, home, youth) for a less important value (work) is devastating.
Typical things companies do to improve productivity, they make the work less enjoyable and less interesting:
- pressure people to put in more hours
- mechanize the process of product deployment
- compromise the quality of the product
- standardize procedures
Next time you hear someone talking about productivity, listen carefully to hear if the speaker uses the term "employee turnover". Chances are low.
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 work experience.
Man's character is dominated by a small number of basic instincts: survival, self-esteem, reproduction, territory, ... Even the slightest challenge to one of these built-in values can be upsetting.
We all tend to tie our self-esteem to the quality of the product we produce. Any step you take that may jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your staff directly against you.
Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will hate what they are doing, but what other choice do they have?
Some of my folks would tinker forever on a task, all in the name of QUALITY. But the market doesn't give a damn about that much quality - it is screaming for the product to be delivered yesterday and will accept it even in a quick-and-dirty state
WRONG. The builders' view of quality is very different - their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own.
Quality, for beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.
In some Japanese companies, the project team has an effective power of veto over delivery of what they believe to be a not-yet-ready product. No matter that the client would be willing to accept even a substandard product, the team can insist that delivery wait until its own standards are achieved.
Parkinson's Law:
Work expands to fill the time allocated for it
Parkinson's Law gives managers the strongest possible conviction that the only way to get work done at all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date. Parkinson's Law almost certainly doesn't apply to your people. Treating people as Parkinsonian workers doesn't work - it can only demean and demotivate them.
Parkinson's Law didn't catch on because it was so true, it caught on because it was funny.
Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they have done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them.
According to 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study - projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever ("Just wake me up when you are done") had the highest productivity of all.
Laetrile - colorless liquid pressed from the apricot pits. Can be used for baking like any extract, in Mexico you can buy it for $50 to "cure" fatal cancer.
Similarly, lots of managers fall into a trap of technical laetrile that purports to improve productivity.
The 7 false hopes of software management:
- There is some new trick you have missed that could send productivity soaring
- Other managers are getting gains of 100-200% or more
- Technology is moving so swiftly that you are being passed by
- Changing languages will give you huge gains
- Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately
- You automate everything else: isn't it about time you automated away your software development staff?
- Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure
What is management:
The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
The work space given to intellect workers is usually noisy, interruptive, un-private and sterile. SOme are prettier than others, but not much more functional.
Police-mentality planners design workspaces the way they would design prison - optimized for containment at minimal cost.
As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it is not worth improving anything but the workspace.
To be productive, people may come in early or stay late or even try to escape entirely, by staying home for a day to get a critical piece of work done. Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment.
Two people from the same organization tend to perform alike. The best performers are clustering in some organizations while the worst performers are clustering in others.
Many companies provide developers with a workplace that is too crowded, noisy, and interruptive as to fill their days with frustration. That alone could explain reduced efficiency as well as tendency for good people to migrate elsewhere.
If you participate in or manage a team of people who need to use their brains during the workday, then the environment is your business.
It is surprising how little the potential savings are compared to the potential risk. The entire cost of work space for developer is a small percentage of the salary paid to the developer - 20:1 ratio.
People need the space and quiet in order to perform optimally. Noise is directly proportional to density, so halving the allotment of space per person can be expected to double the noise.
Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune.
In the office: 30% of the time, people are noise sensitive, and the rest of the time, they are noise generators.
Each time you are interrupted, you require an additional immersion period to get back into flow. During this immersion, you are not really doing work.
People have to be reassured that it is not their fault if they can only manage one or two uninterrupted hours a week - rather it is the organization's fault for not providing a flow-conductive environment. None of this data can go to the Payroll Department.
The collection of uninterrupted-hour data can give you some meaningful metric evidence of just good or bad your environment is.
E-Factor = Uninterrupted Hours / Body-Present Hours
When you are doing think-intensive work like design, interruptions are productivity killers. When you are doing sales and marketing support, you have to take every single call that comes in. Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration. "Leave me alone, I am working" ethic can emerge. People must learn that it is okay sometimes not to answer the phone, and their managers need to understand that as well.
That is the character of knowledge workers' work: The quality of their time is important, not just its quantity.
There are some prevalent symbols of success and failure in creating a sensible workplace. The most obvious symbol of success is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs.
Don't expect the Establishment to roll over and play dead just because you begin to complain. There at least 3 counterarguments to surface almost immediately:
- People don't care about glitzy office space. They are too intelligent for that. And the ones who do care are just
playing status games.
- Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you.
- Maybe noise is a problem, but there are cheaper ways to deal with it than mucking around with the physical layout. We
could just pipe in white noise of Muzak and cover up the disturbance.
- You can either treat the symptom or treat the cause. Treating the cause means choosing isolation in the form of noise barriers - walls and doors - and these cost money. Treating the symptom is much cheaper, when you install Muzak or some other form of pink noise, you can save even more money by ignoring the problem.
- Enclosed offices don't make for a vital environment. We want people to interact productively, and that is what they
want, too. So walls and doors would be a step in the wrong direction.
- Enclosed offices don't have to be one-person offices. 2, 3, 4-person office makes a lot more sense.
Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible work space.
People cannot work effectively if their workspace is too enclosed or too exposed. A good workspace strikes the balance. You feel more comfortable in a workspace if there is a wall behind you. There should be no blank wall closer than 2.5m in front of you (eye relief). You should not be able to hear noises very different from the kind you make, from your workspace. Workspaces should allow you to face in different directions.
Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them
~ Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language
Hornblower is the ultimate manager - his career advanced from midshipman to admiral through the same blend of cleverness, daring, political maneuvering and good luck.
Managers are supposed to use their leadership skills to bring out untapped qualities in each subordinate - this is not realistic. The manager doesn't have enough leverage to make a difference in person's nature. So the people who work for you through whatever period will be more or less the same at the end as they were at the beginning. If they are not right for the job from the start, they will never be. Getting the right people in the first place is all important.
Most hiring mistakes result from too much attention to appearance. Evolution has planted in each of us a certain uneasiness toward people who differ by very much from the norm. 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 only to their staff's accomplishments.
Companies sometimes impose standards of dress, they remove considerable discretion from the individual. The effect is devastating - people can talk and think of nothing else, all useful work stops dead. The most valuable people begin to realize that they aren't appreciated for their contributions, but for haircuts and neckties.
The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behaviour. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional - long hair on male's head, comfortable shoes, dancing around desk, laughing, ...
Second thermodynamic law of management: Entropy is always increasing in the org. - That's why most elderly institutions are tighter and a lot of less fun than sprightly young companies.
One of the worst dreadful "motivational" posters says: "The speed of the leader sets the rate of the pack" == work-extraction mechanism, purpose is to increase quantity, not quality - work harder, stay loner, stop goofing off.
Leadership is not about extracting anything from somebody - it is about service, while they sometimes set explicit directions, their main role is that of a catalyst, not a director.
Rebellious leadership is important in order to innovate - they should supply time to innovate (take a person away from doing billable work). Nobody knows enough to give permission to the key innovators to do what needs to be done. That's why leadership as a service almost always operates without official permission.
If companies were more likely inclined to let leadership arise naturally, they wouldn't need to produce so much hot air talking about it.
You are hiring a person to produce, you need to examine a sample of those products to see the quality of work the candidate does. Otherwise, the interview is just a talk.
You can show off your portfolio as part of each interview.
Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. They test if person is likely to perform immediately after being hired. Aptitude tests are left-brain oriented. The aptitude test may give you people who perform better in the short term, but are less likely to succeed later on. Use them, but not for hiring.
Hiring process needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication traits. Ask a candidate to prepare 10-15 minute presentation on some aspect of past work (technology, management, project) - you will be able to see candidate's communication skills.
The capacity of a team to absorb newness has its limits. Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can't be changing. If you need to use a reactive strategy of labor, your team will probably never jell. In fact, the workspace you manage almost certainly will not be a team at all.
For youngest employees, computers, smartphones, the Web, programming, hacking, social networking, and blogging are environment, not technology.
Young people divide their attention while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at once. Continuous partial attention is the opposite of flow. There is a difference between spending 2% of time on Facebook in a single block of time vs spending 2% of attention all day on Facebook.
Articulating requirements to young workers is going to be essential to give them a chance to fit in.
Typical turnover figures are in the range of 80-33%/year => average employee longevity averages between 15 and 36 months. The average person leaves after a little more than two years. It costs 1.5-2 months' salary to hire a new employee (agency or in-house HR).
A new employee is quite useless on Day Zero (or even less than useless), after few months the new person is doing some useful work. Within 5 months, he/she is at full working capacity.
The total cost of replacing each person is the equivalent of 4.5-5 months of employee cost or about 20% of the cost of keeping that employee for the full 2 years on the job. And the is only the visible cost of turnover.
In companies with high turnover, people ten toward a destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just aren't going to be there very long. In an organization with high turnover, nobody is willing to take the long view.
If people only stick around for a year or two, the only way to conserve the best people is to promote them quickly. From the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health.
Reasons account for most departures:
- A just-passing-through mentality - no feelings of long-term involvement in the job
- A feeling of disposability - workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is really high, nobody is indispensable)
- A sense that loyalty would be ludicrous - who would be loyal to an org that views its people as parts
People leave quickly -> no spending money on training -> no investment in the individual -> individual thinks of moving on.
The best companies are consciously striving to be best. People tend to stay at such companies because there is a widespread sense that you are expected to stay. A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining (you are forever bumping into managers and officers who started out as secretaries, payroll clerks, or in the mailroom).
Companies that manage their investment sensibly will prosper in the long run. Companies of knowledge workers have to realize that it is their in human capital that matters most. The good ones already do.
Jelled Team - a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of parts. The production of such team is greater than that of the same people working in unjelled team. Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes up dramatically. They don't need to be managed in the traditional sense, and they certainly don't need to be motivated. They have got momentum.
Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism.
The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment
Signs of jelled team:
- low turnover
- strong sense of identity (colourful name)
- sense or eliteness (part of something unique, this attitude might be annoying to people outside the group)
- joint ownership
The story about the legendary, jelled team - The Black Team.
You can't control jelling - the process is too fragile to be controlled. Exact steps are hard to describe, the opposite is easier. Teamicide techniques:
- Defensive management
- let your people make mistakes, do not send a message that making errors is forbidden
- "My people are too dumb to build systems without me"
- people who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team
- Bureaucracy
- mindless paper pushing hurts team formation
- Physical separation
- group members may grow stronger bonds to non-group neighbours, just because they see more of them
- putting people together gives them opportunity for the casual interaction that is so necessary for team formation
- Fragmentation of people's time
- bad for team formation and efficiency
- no one can be part of multiple jelled teams
- Quality reduction of the product
- typical scenario: deliver a product in less time = lower quality
- self-esteem and enjoyment are undermined by the necessity of building a product of clearly lower quality than what they are capable of
- Phony deadlines
- the date mentioned is impossible to meet, and everyone knows it
- team will not jell in such environment
- Clique control
- there are no jelled teams at managerial level
- as you go higher and higher in the organization chart, the concept of jelled teams reduces further into oblivion
2 additional kinds of teamicide:
- motivational posters
- are phony enough to make most people's skin crawl
- overtime
- error, burnout, accelerated turnover, and compensatory undertime
- disrupts team
Coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination, personal growth and feels good. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past. The act of coaching cannot take place if people don't feel safe. In competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached. You would be similarly crazy to coach someone else, as that person may eventually yse your assistance to pass you by.
Anything the manager does to increase the competition within a team has to be viewed as teamidical.
Good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, os simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together.
The Open Kimono attitude is the opposite of defensive management. You take no steps to defend yourself from the people you have put into positions of trust. A person you can't trust with any autonomy is of no use to you.
If you have got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out their hair occasionally. Visual supervision is for prisoners.
Some organizations are famous for their consistent good luck in getting well-knit teams to happen. It isn't luck - it's chemistry. These organizations are just plain healthy.
Signs of a health organization:
- people at ease
- people having a good time
- people enjoying interactions with their peers
- no defensiveness
- the work is a joint product
- everybody is proud of the quality
- managers devote their energy to build and maintain healthy chemistry
Chemistry-building strategy:
- Make a cult of quality - cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation
- Provide lots of satisfying closure - people need reassurance from time to time that they are headed in the right direction
- Build a sense of eliteness - people require a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves, and they need to be at peace with themselves to let the jelling process begin
- Allow and encourage heterogeneity - diverse teams are more fun to work in
- Preserve and protect successful teams
- Provide strategic but not tactical direction
Managers are usually not part of the teams that they manage. On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths.
A Methodology - a general theory of how a whole class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. The people who carry write the Methodology are smart. The people who carry it out can be dumb.
There is a big difference between Methodology and methodology - methodology is a basic approach one takes to get a job done. It doesn't reside in a fat book, but rather inside the heads of people carrying out the work. Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking. All meaningful decisions are made by the Methodology builders, not by the staff assigned to do the work.
Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, not part of the solution. People should focus on getting things done, instead of building documents.
People might actually do exactly what the Methodology says, and the work would grind nearly to a halt.
Our main problems are more likely to be sociological than technological in nature.
Projects that have real value but little or no risk were all done ages ago. The ones that matter today are laden with risk.
Risk management: it is not to make the risk go away, but to enable sensible mitigation - planned and provisioned well ahead of time.
Some orgs are addicted to meetings, at the other extreme, some orgs refuse to use the "M" word at all.
As orgs age, meeting time increases until there is time for nothing else. Even short stand-ups can be a drag on an organization's effectiveness is they lack purpose and focus.
In order to cure meeting-addicted org, start small and eliminate most ceremonial meetings in your area, spend time in one-on-one conversations, limit attendance at working meetings. Encourage Open-Space networking to give people the chance to have unstructured interaction.
wasting people's time.
WHen participants of a meeting take turns interacting with one key figure, the expected rationale for assembling the whole group is missing - the boss might as well have interacted separately with each of the subordinates.
Fragmented time is almost certain teamicidal, but also is guaranteed to waste the individual's time.
The human capital invested in your workforce also represents a ton of money.
When you over-coordinate the people who work for you, they are too likely to under-coordinate their own efforts. But self-coordination and mutual coordination amon peers is the hallmark of graceful teamwork.
Imagine how it would work if every pass could only happen if and when the coach gave the signal from the sideline. A decent coach understands that his/her job is to help people learn to self-coordinate.
Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you are not going to get much done.
People hate change, and that is because people hate change. People really hate change, they really, really do.
When we start out to change, it is never certain that we will succeed. The uncertainty is more compelling than the possible gain.
The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional
You can never improve if you can't change at all.
Change involves at least 4 stages: Old Status Quo -> Chaos -> Practice and Integration -> News Status Quo. Change happens upon introduction of a foreign element: a catalyst for a change. Without a catalyst, there is no recognition of the desirability of change.
Change won't get even started unless people fell safe - people feel safe when they know they will not be demeaned for proposing a change.
Change has only a chance of succeeding if failure is also okay.
Learning is a critical improvement mechanism - non-learners can not expect to prosper for very long without learning.
Experience gets turned into learning when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience has shown.
Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people
When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can't take place at all. In such an organization, attempts to change skills or to improve redesigned procedures are an exercises in futility.
What great managers do best? The making of community. A need for community is something that is built right into the human firmware.
Community doesn't just happen on the job. It has to be made. The people who make it are the unsung heroes of our work experience.
An org that succeeds in building a satisfying community tends to keep its people. No one wants to leave. The investment made in human capital is retained, and upper management is willing to invest more. When the company invest more in its people, the people perform better and feel better about themselves and about their company.
There is no formula to build community in the workplace. Some experimenting is needed.
There is something about human nature that makes us the implacable enemies of chaos. People who were attracted to the lack of order, feel nostalgic fondness foe the days when everything wasn't so awfully mechanical.
Some lost disorder can be reintroduced to breath some energy into the work - a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder:
- Pilot projects
- set the fat book of standards aside and try some new unproved technique
- people get the boost in energy when they are doing something new and different
- War games
- war games help you evaluate your relative strengths and weaknesses and help the organization to observe its global strengths and weaknesses
- a bug fuss should be made over any and all accomplishments
- Brainstorming
- interactive session, targeted on creative insight
- focus on quantity of ideas, not quality, keep proceedings loose, even silly, discourage negative comments
- Provocative training experiences
- Training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats
- everybody relishes a chance to get out of the office
- when a team is forming, it makes a good business sense to fight for travel money to get team members out of office together
- adventure adds small amounts of constructive disorder
Free electrons - workers having a strong role in choosing their own orbits. Positions with loosely stated responsibilities so that the individual has a strong say in defining the work. Companies profit from such people.
Some individuals need to be left alone to work out some matters, or at least free to seek guidance if and when and from whomever he or she chooses. The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits who have the proper mix of perspective and maturity and then turn them loose.
A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. But there is no need to act alone. When something is terribly out of kilter, it takes very little to raise people's consciousness of it. Then it is no longer you. It is everyone.
It may be small voice saying: "This is unacceptable" -- people know it is true. Once it has been said out loud, they can't ignore it any longer.
Sociology matters more than technology or even money. It is supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn't, there is nothing else worth concerning on. Choose your terrain carefully, assemble your facts, and speak up. You can make a difference.