notes-books-theDeadline

Tom DeMarco?, The Deadline, a novel about project management

4 essentials of good management:

• get the right ppl
• match them up to the right job
• keep them motivated
• help their teams to jell and stay jelled

"people can't embrace change unless they feel safe"

(i didn't take note about the probs with neg reinforcement b/c this is obvious)

" lead with you heart, ... trust your hunches ((gut)), build soul into the organization, develop a nose for bullshit "

" by the time the battle begins, the manager's real work is already done

...

hiring involves all of the managerial body parts: heart, soul, nose, and gut (but mostly gut)

don't try to do it alone -- two guts are more than twice as good as one

ask new hires to undertake one project at exactly the level of competence they have already proved, to defer real stretch goals until the next time

ask for pointers; the person you are most inclined to hire may know of other good possibilities

listen more than you speak

"

and, first, roughly order the list of candidates' resumes by potential, and spend your time at the top of the list first

" productivity improvement

there is no such thing as a short-term productivity fix

productivity improvement comes from long-term investment

anything that promises immediate-term results is likely to be snake oil

risk management

manage projects by managing their risks

create and maintain a census of risks for each project

Track the causal risks, not just the ultimate undesirable outcomes.

Assess each risk for probability and likely cost.

Predict, for each risk, the earliest symptom that might indicate materialization.

Appoint a risk officer, one person who is not expected to maintain a Can-Do attitude.

Establish easy (perhaps anonymous) channels for bad news to be communicated up the hierarchy (83). "

" Playing Defense:

• Cut your losses.
• You can improve overall performance more by containing your failures than by optimizing your successes.
• Be aggressive about canceling failed efforts early.
• Don't take chances on team jell if you don't have to: Seek out and use preformed teams.
• Keep good teams together (when they're willing) to help your successors avoid problems of slow-jelling or non-jelling teams.
• Think of a jelled team-ready and willing to take on a new effort-as one of the project deliverables.
• A day lost at the beginning of a project hurts as much as a day lost at the end.
• There are infinitely many ways to lose a day. but not even one way to get one back. "

" Modeling and Simulation of the Development Process:

• Model your hunches about the processes that get work done.
• Use the models in peer interaction to communicate and refine thinking about how the process works.
• Use the models to simulate results.
• Tune the models against actual results. "

" Pathological Politics:

• You have to be willing to put your job on the line any day,
• ... , but that doesn't guarantee that pathological politics won't affect you.
• Pathological politics can crop up anywhere, even in the healthiest organization.
• The defining characteristic of pathological politics is that goals of personal power and influence come to override the natural goals of an organization.
• This can happen even when the pathological goal is directly opposed to the organizational goal.
• Among the bad side effects of pathology: It becomes unsafe to have a leanly staffed project. "

" Metrics:

• Size every single product.
• Don't sweat the units while you're waiting to achieve objective metrification, use subjective units.
• Form synthetic metrics from all the primitives (countable characteristics of the software) available to you.
• Collect archeological data to derive productivity trends from now-ended projects.
• Tinker with the formulation for your synthetic metric until its value gives the best correction to Effort for the set projects in your archeological database.
• Draw a trend line through your data base, showing expected Effort as a function of values of the synthetic metric. (multiple regression))
• Now, for each new project to be estimated, compute value of the synthetic metric and use it to pick off expected Effort from the trend line.
• Use the noise level around the productivity trend as an indicator of what tolerance to apply to the projections. "

" Process and Process Improvement:

• Good process and continually improving process are admirable goals.
• They are also very natural goals: Good technical workers will focus on them whether you tell them to or not.
• Formal process improvement programs cost time and money; a given process improvement effort may well set project work back. Even if productivity gains materialize, they are unlikely to offset the time spent on process improvement for those projects that host the program. A project can hope to gain enough from a single well-chosen method improvement to repay the time and money invested in the change.
• Projects cannot realistically hope to accommodate more than one method improvement over their duration. Multi-skill improvement programs (for instance, increasing by an entire CMM level) are most likely to make projects finish later than they would have without the program.
• The danger of standard process is that people will miss chances to take important shortcuts.
• Particularly on overstaffed projects, standard process will be observed rigorously as long as it generates sufficient work (useful or not) to keep everyone busy. "

" Changing the Way Work Gets Done:

• There is no way to get projects to perform substantially beyond the norm without making large reductions in the total amount of debugging time.
• High-performing projects spend proportionately far less of their time in debugging.
• High-performing projects spend proportionately far more of their time in design. "

"You can't get people to do anything different without caring for them and about them. To get them to change, you have to understand (appreciate) where they're coming and why. "

" The Effects of Pressure:

• People under pressure don't think any faster.
• Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction tactic.
• Short bursts of pressure and even overtime may be a useful tactic as they focus people and increase the sense that the work is important, but extended pressure is always a mistake.
• Perhaps managers make so much use of pressure because they don't know what else to do, or are daunted by how difficult the alternatives are.
• Terrible suspicion: The real reason for use of pressure and overtime may be to make everyone look better when the project fails. "

" The Angry Manager:

• Anger and contempt in management are contagious. When upper management is abusive, lower management mimics the same behavior (much like abused children who go on to become abusive parents).
• Managerial contempt is supposed to act as a goad to get people to invest more in their performance. It is the most frequent “stick” for the carrot-and-stick management. But where is the evidence that contempt has ever caused anyone to perform better?
• A manager's use of contempt to goad workers is more a sign of the manager's inadequacy than the workers'. "

" Ambiguous Specification:

• Ambiguity in a specification is a sign of unresolved conflict among the various system stakeholders.
• A specification that doesn't contain a complete census of inputs and outputs is a nonstarter; it simply doesn't begin to specify.
• Nobody will tell you if a specification is lousy. People are inclined to blame themselves rather than it. "

todo here

Conflict:

• Whenever there are multiple parties to a development effort, there are bound to be conflicting interests.
• The business of building and installing systems is particularly conflict-prone.
• Most system development organizations have poor conflict-resolution skills.
• Conflict deserves respect. Conflict is not a sign of unprofessional behavior.
• Declare up front that everybody's win conditions will be respected. Make sure that win conditions are elicited at all levels.
• Negotiation is hard; mediation is easy.
• Arrange up front that when win conditions are mutually exclusive or partly so, the parties will be expected to move into mediation to resolve conflict.
• Remember: We are both on the same side; it is the problem that's on the other side.

" Role of the Catalyst:

• There is such a thing a catalytic personality. Such people contribute to projects by helping teams to form and jell, and to remain healthy and productive. Even if our catalysts did nothing else (they usually do a lot else), their catalytic role is important and valuable.
• Mediation is a special case of the catalytic role. Mediation is learnable with a small investment.
• The small ceremony beginning, "May I help by trying to mediate for you?" can be an essential first step in conflict resolution.
• dont try to mediate without consent!
• one role of the mediator is to help the parties avoid taking fixed positions; because once both parties have taken a position from which they can't back down, they can no longer compromise.
• mediators must be disinterested parties with little power over the principals

when in conflict with someone: sometimes it may be useful to throw down the gauntlet, but in a way so that they don't have to pick it up (they don't lose face if they ignore it; e.g. if someone is trying to force you to do something you don't want to do, one thing to do is to pretend outwardly to obey, but if they will be able to find out about your disobedience, send them a covert signal that you are disobeying them, in a way so that others don't notice, and not so directly so that they know that you know that they know that you're sending them a signal; if there is some chance that they don't see the signal, they have the option to ignore the signal without conceding the larger dominance contest completely

Human Error:

• It is not what you don't know that kills you, ... it's what you know that isn't true.

Staff Level:

• Early overstaffing tends to force projects into shortcutting the key design activity (to give all those people something to do).
• When work is divided over a large staff prior to completion of design, the interfaces among people and among work groups are not minimized.
• This leads to increased interdependence, meeting time, rework, and frustration.
• Ideal stuffing requires a small core team for most of the project, and then significant numbers of people added late in the process (as late as the last sixth of scheduled time).
• Awful suspicion: Projects that set on to achieve 'aggressive' schedules probably take longer to complete than they would have if started with more reasonable schedules.

" Project Sociology:

• Keep meetings small by making it safe for unessential people not to attend. A published agenda, rigorously followed, is the easiest way to make nonattendance safe" (o/w ppl are afraid that a subject may be discussed at the mtng which affects their interests.

" * Projects have need for ceremony.

• Use ceremony to focus attention on project goals and ideals: small meetings, zero-defect work, etc.
• Take steps to protect people from abusive anger.
• Remember: Anger=Fear. Managers who inflict abusive, angry behavior on their subordinates are almost always doing it because they're afraid.
• Observation: If everybody understands that Anger=Fear, anger will be a transparent signal that the angry person is afraid; since there is an inclination not to reveal fear, he or she won't be able to vent the anger anymore. (This doesn't solve the angry person's problem, but it sure can make it easier on everyone else.) "
• example ceremony. goal: express value of small meetings. steps: (1) at the beginning of each meeting, manager finds one or a few ppl whose time you feel worst about taking up for the meeting (i.e. whose time you value most; be careful not to choose someone you just don't need at the meeting, b/c then they would lose face) (2) manager publically releases them from the meeting, asking them to do (3), (3) they tell the group what they would like to happen at the meeting (4) the group gives their consent to them leaving, and they leave.
• (1) manager declares the value of releasing even one person from the mtng and their intention to do so (2) group gives the manager their consent (3) manager selects and releases one or more people from the meeting because other tasks that they could do if released are particularly critical to the project (4) these people provide a parting statement to the group about what they would like to see happen at the meeting (5) the group signals approval as they leave

Pathological Politics (again):

• You can't expect to cure pathology from beneath.
• Don't waste your time or jeopardize your position by trying.
• Sometimes, your only option is to bide your time, waiting for the problem to resolve itself, or for a good opportunity for you to move on.
• Miracles may happen (but don't count on them).

Lean and Mean:

• Lean and Mean is a formula developed in failing companies by the people responsible for the failure.
• It is the opposite of any organization's natural goal: to be prosperous and caring.
• Whenever you hear the phrase "lean and mean", replace it with what it really connotes: failing and frightened.

Radical Common Sense:

• A project needs to have both goals and estimates.
• They should be different.