Peopleware (Parte VI)

Finalmente, esta es la última entrega de los resúmenes del libro Peopleware y corresponde a la sexta sección. Los resúmenes anteriores están en los siguientes enlaces:

• Peopleware (Parte I)
• Peopleware (Parte II)
• Peopleware (Parte III)
• Peopleware (Parte IV)
• Peopleware (Parte V)

PART VI

Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend to look back on significant coaching we've received as a near religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others.

The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about some subject matter. You would be similarly crazy to coach someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance to pass you by.

Our point here is somewhat more limited: Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

The paradox of the CMM is that process improvement is good, but process improvement programs aren't, or at least they often aren't. Competent people are involved in process improvement all the time: They take pride in progress and growth, and these can only come from getting more proficient at what they do. This kind of low-level process refinement is the basic hygiene of knowledge work, but formal process improvement moves responsibility up from the individual to the organization. The individual may strive for, practice, and/or promote good skills, but the organization can only institutionalize them. It is in this institutionalization that the danger lies.

Organizations that build products with the most value to their customers win. Those that build products that make the world yawn lose, even though they build them very, very efficiently. Even those who stumble while building products of high value win over the efficient yawners. Process isn't worth a rip unless it's applied to projects that are worth doing.

When process improvement (as in "Level 3 by the end of the year!") becomes the goal, the scary projects get put onto the back burner. It's those scary projects, unfortunately, that are
probably the ones worth doing. All the projects that carry real benefit carry real risks along
with them. It is the project that has some novelty, some innovation or invention, that might grab the customer's imagination and wallet.

Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware (Parte V)

Esta es la quinta entrega correspondiente al resumen de la quinta sección del libro Peopleware. Pueden acceder a las anteriores entregas aquí:

• Peopleware (Parte I)
• Peopleware (Parte II)
• Peopleware (Parte III)
• Peopleware (Parte IV)
  

PART V

A pilot project is one in which you set the fat book of standards aside and try some new and unproved technique. The new technique will be unfamiliar initially, and so you can expect to be inefficient at the start in applying it. This is a cost of change. On the other side of the ledger is the improvement in productivity gained from using the new technique. Also on the plus side of the ledger is the Hawthorne Effect, the boost in energy and interest that infuses your people when they're doing something new and different.

One caveat about pilot projects: Don't experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on any given project. For all the talk about the importance of standards, it's surprising how often managers abandon all standards on the rare project that is designated a pilot. They often try out new hardware, new software, new quality control procedures, matrix management, and new prototyping techniques, all on the same project.

War games help you to evaluate your relative strengths and weaknesses and help the organization to observe its global strengths and weaknesses. For these reasons, two of our client companies are now undertaking a program of annual war games, used by their employees to gauge improvements in their own skills over time. Once a year, they subject themselves to the confidential testing process, much as you would submit yourself to a physical exam.

For the purpose of stimulating creative disorder, the most effective form of war game calls for participants to take part in teams. When you pull this off successfully, people will tell you they've had the most exciting and enjoyable experience of their entire careers; nothing less than that is your goal. Expect to achieve that goal, though it may take a few tries.

Running the project through a whole night, for some reason, adds to the fun. People love an excuse to get tired together, to push back sleep and let their peers see them with their hair down, unshaved, rumpled, and grumpy, with no makeup or pretense. And it makes them feel more closely bound to each other.

Perhaps this is a sad comment on the dismal corporate workplace, but everybody relishes a chance to get out of the office. The chance that workers relish most is one combining travel with their peers and a one-of-a-kind experience. It might be going off together for a training session, particularly a provocative one, or taking in the International Conference on Whatever.

Is a few thousand dollars for a getaway experience too rich for your discretionary disorder budget? Maybe you could spring for forty dollars. One of the most innovative managers we know has a penchant for putting on unexpected lunches for his staff. He once went down to the city street and hired a hot dog vendor, complete with cart, sauerkraut, yellow mustard, and a blue and orange umbrella, to come up thirty floors and serve lunch to the team. The
lunch was a nutritionist's nightmare but a sociologist's dream come true. Those who were there got high on good spirits and began to do bits and skits about their work, their managers, and each other. The noise level went up with their enthusiasm. It cost forty dollars and has been talked about ever since. Of course, that manager wrote it up as a business lunch, but it wasn't a lunch at all, it was a celebration.

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. Such a manager knows that he or she really can't give direction to these natural free electrons. They have progressed to the point where their own direction is more unerringly in the best interest of the organization than any direction that might come down from above. It's time to get out of their way.

It doesn't take great prescience to see that one of these measures is all you're likely to pull off successfully. If you try more, you will just diffuse your efforts. The rumpus you'll raise will be more confusing than constructive, and your colleagues and those above you in the corporate hierarchy are likely to write you off as a whiner. One change is plenty. Even a single substantive change to the sociology of your organization will be a mammoth accomplishment.
The key to success in fostering the kind of change we're advocating is that you not try to wrestle the bull. You're certainly not strong enough for that.A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. But there's no need to act alone. When something is
terribly out of kilter (like too much noise in the workplace), it takes very little to raise people's consciousness of it. Then it's no longer just you. It's everyone.

Sociology matters more than technology or even money. It's supposed to be productive, satisfying fun to work. If it isn't, then there's nothing else worth concentrating on. Choose your terrain carefully, assemble your facts, and speak up. You can make a difference...

Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware (Parte IV)

Despues de varios meses, me animo a continuar publicando el resumen con lo más resaltante de Peopleware. A continuación la cuarta entrega correspondiente a la cuarta sección del libro. He aquí las anteriores:

• Peopleware (Parte I)
• Peopleware (Parte II)
• Peopleware (Parte III)

PART IV

Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naive managerial optimism. The mechanism by which individuals involve themselves in the organization's objectives is more complex than that. You wouldn't be surprised to learn, for example, that the fellow you know as a database specialist is more inclined to describe himself as a father, a boy scout leader, and a member of the local school board. In these roles, he makes thoughtful value judgments all the time. What would be a surprise is if he stopped making value judgments when he arrived at work. He doesn't He is continually at work examining each claim for his individual energies and loyalty. Organizational goals come in for constant scrutiny by the people who work for the organization, and most of those goals are judged to be awfully arbitrary.

While the executive committee may get itself all heated up over a big increase in profits, this same objective is pretty small potatoes to people at the bottom of the heap.

Goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary to people-corporations seem arbitrary to people-but the arbitrariness of goals doesn't mean no one is ever going to accept them. If it did, we wouldn't have sports. The goals in sports are always utterly arbitrary.
The Universe doesn't care whether the little white ball goes between the posts at Argentina's end of the field or those at Italy's. But a lot of people get themselves very involved in the outcome. Their involvement is a function of the social units they belong to.

We stopped talking about building teams, and talked instead of growing them. The agricultural image seemed right. Agriculture isn't entirely controllable. You enrich the soil, you plant seeds, you water according to the latest theory, and you hold your breath. You just might get a crop; you might not. If it all comes up roses, you'll feel fine, but next year you'll be you'll be sweating it out again. That's pretty close to how team formation works.

If the staff comes to believe it's not allowed to make any errors of its own, the message that you don't trust them comes through loud and clear. There is no message you can send that will better inhibit team formation.

The common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot sub-projects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together. The
best success is the one in which there is no evident management, in which the team works as a genial aggregation of peers. The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again without the team members knowing they've been "managed." These bosses are viewed by their peers as just lucky. Everything seems to break right for them. They get a fired-up team of people, the project comes together quickly, and everyone stays enthusiastic through the end. These managers never break into a sweat. It looks so easy that no one can believe they are managing at all.

If you've 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 of their hair occasionally. Any easily separable task is a perfect opportunity. There is no real management required for such work. Send them away. Find a remote office, hire a conference room, borrow somebody's summer house, or put them up at a hotel. Take advantage of off-season rates at ski areas or at beaches. Have them go to a conference, and then stay over for a few days to work together in peace. (We've heard of a least one instance of each of these ploys.)

Such a plan will cost you some points with your own management and peers, because it's so audacious. How can you know, they'll ask you, that your people aren't loafing this very minute? How can you be sure they won't knock off for lunch at eleven and drink away their afternoons? The simple answer is you'll know by the product they come back with. By their fruits, ye shall know them. If they bring back a carefully thought-out and complete result, they worked. If they don't, they didn't. Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization:

• Make a cult of quality.
• Provide lots of satisfying closure.
• Build a sense of eliteness.
• Allow and encourage heterogeneity.
• Preserve and protect successful teams.
• Provide strategic but not tactical direction.

Organizations also have some need for closure. Closure for the organization is the successful finish of the work as assigned, plus perhaps an occasional confirmation along the way that everything is on target (maybe a milestone achieved or a significant partial delivery completed). How much confirmation corporations require is a function of how much money is at risk. Frequently, closure only at the end of a four-year effort is adequate for the needs of the organization.

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. When management acts to stifle uniqueness, uniqueness happens anyway. People simply express their uniquenessin uncontrolled dimensions. For example, employees who tak a perverse pride in being difficult to manage or hard to motivate or unable to work with others may be reacting to too much control. They would almost certainly rather express themselves in some less difficult way, something that would not work to the detriment of the group's effectiveness.

If a team does knit, don't break it up. At least give people the option to undertake another project together. They may choose to go their separate ways, but they ought to have the choice. When teams stay together from one project to the next, they start out each new endeavor with enormous momentum.

You can't always make it happen, but when a team does come together, it's worth the cost. The work is fun, the people are energized. They roll over deadlines and milestones and look for more. They like themselves. They feel loyal to the team and to the environment that allows the team to exist.

Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware (Parte III)

Continuando con lo mejor de Peopleware (IMHO, por supuesto), aquí esta lo correspondiente a la tercera parte del libro. Si no lo han hecho, les recomiendo que primero revisen los posts anteriores:

• Peopleware (Parte I)
• Peopleware (Parte II)

PART III

Management science is much more concerned with the boss's role as principal strategist and tactician of the work. You are taught to think of management as playing out one of those battle simulation board games. There are no personalities or individual talents to be reckoned with in such a game; you succeed or fail based on your decisions of when and where to deploy your faceless resources.

• get the right people
• make them happy so they don't want to leave
• turn them loose

Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. So popcorn is unprofessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional. Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional. Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It's all right to smile, but not too often.)

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone. Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological. In a healthier organizational culture, people are thought professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent.

Circus Manager: How long have you been juggling?

Candidate: Oh, about six years.

Manager: Can you handle three balls, four balls, and five balls?

Candidate: Yes, yes, and yes.

Manager: Do you work with flaming objects?

Candidate: Sure.

Manager: ... knives, axes, open cigar boxes, floppy hats?

Candidate: I can juggle anything.

Manager: Do you have a line of funny patter that goes with your juggling?

Candidate: It's hilarious.

Manager: Well, that sounds fine. I guess you're hired.

Candidate: Umm ... Don't you want to see me juggle?

Manager: Gee, I never thought of that.

Aptitude tests are almost always oriented toward the tasks the person will perform immediately after being hired. They test whether he or she is likely to be good at statistical analysis or programming or whatever it is that's required in the position. You can buy aptitude tests in virtually any technical area, and they all tend to have fairly respectable track records at predicting how well the new hire will perform. But so what? A successful new hire might do those tasks for a few years and then move on to be team leader or a product manager or a project head. That person might end up doing the tasks that the test measured for two years and then do other things for twenty.

The idea is simple enough. You ask a candidate to prepare a ten- or fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. It could be about a new technology and the experience with first trying it out, or about a management lesson learned the hard way, or about a particularly interesting project. The candidate chooses the subject. The date is set and you assemble a small audience made up of those who will be the new hire's co-workers.

Of course the candidate will be nervous, perhaps even reluctant to undertake such an experience. You'll have to explain that all candidates are nervous about the audition and give your reasons for holding one: to see the various candidates' communication skills, and to give the future co-workers a part in the hiring process. At the end of the audition and after the candidate has left, you hold a debriefing of those present. Each one gets to comment on the person's suitability for the job and whether he or she seems likely to fit well into the team. Although it's ultimately your responsibility to decide whether to hire or not, the feedback from future co-workers can be invaluable. Even more important, any new person hired is more likely to be accepted smoothly into the group, since the other group members have had a voice in choosing the candidate.

In companies with high turnover, people tend toward a destructively short-term viewpoint, because they know they just aren't going to be there very long. So if you find yourself campaigning for better workspace for your staff, for example, don't be surprised to bump into someone up the hierarchy who counters with an argument like this:

"Hold on there, Buster. You're talking about big bucks. If we gave our engineers that much space and noise protection and even privacy, we might end up spending fifty dollars per person per month! Multiply that times all the engineers and you're into the tens of thousands of dollars. We can't spend that kind of money. I'm as much in favor of productivity as the next guy, but have you seen what a terrible third quarter we're having?"

Many of us have come to believe that companies that promote early are where the action is. That's natural, because as young workers we're eager to get ahead. But from the corporate perspective, late promotion is a sign of health. In companies with low turnover, promotion into the first-level management position comes only after as much as ten years with the company. (This has long been true of some of the strongest organizations within IBM, for example.) The people at the lowest level have on the average at least five years' experience. The hierarchy is low and flat.

The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. People leave quickly, so there's no use spending money on training. Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual thinks nothing of moving on. New people are not hired for their extraordinary qualities, since replacing extraordinary qualities is too difficult. The feeling that the company sees nothing extraordinary in the worker makes the worker feel unappreciated as an individual. Other people are leaving all the time, so there's something wrong with you if you're still here next year.

Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware (Parte II)

Continuando con mi humilde selección de lo más resaltante de Peopleware, aquí esta lo correspondiente a la segunda parte del libro. Revisen también el post anterior.

PART II

Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks. It's only when you're in flow that the work goes well.

Unfortunately, you can't turn on flow like a switch. It takes a slow descent into the subject, requiring fifteen minutes or more of concentration before the state is locked in. During this immersion period, you are particularly sensitive to noise and interruption. A disruptive environment can make it difficult or impossible to attain flow.

If the average incoming phone call takes five minutes and your reimmersion period is fifteen minutes, the total cost of that call inflow time (work time) lost is twenty minutes. A dozen phone calls use up half a day. A dozen other interruptions and the rest of the work day is gone. This is what guarantees, "You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5."

If you're a manager, you may be relatively unsympathetic to the frustrations of being in no-flow. After all, you do most of your own work in interrupt mode -that's management- but the people who work for you need to get into flow. Anything that keeps them from it will reduce their effectiveness and the satisfaction they take in their work. It will also increase the cost of getting the work done.

What matters is not the amount of time you're present, but the amount of time that you're -working at full potential. An hour in flow really accomplishes something, but ten six-minute work periods sandwiched between eleven interruptions won't accomplish anything.

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 workspace. Uniformity has no place in this view. You have to grin and bear it when people put up odd pictures or leave their desks a mess or move the furniture around or merge their offices. When they've got it just the way they want it, they'll be able to put it out of their minds entirely and get on with the work.

We are trained to accept windowless office space as inevitable. The company would love for every one of us to have a window, we hear, but that just isn't realistic. Sure it is. There is a perfect proof that sufficient windows can be built into a space without excessive cost. The existence proof is the hotel, any hotel. You can't even imagine being shown a hotel room with no window. You wouldn't stand for it. (And this is for a space you're only going to sleep in.) So hotels are constructed with lots of windows.

Even if there is a higher cost per worker to house people in the more agreeable space, the added expense is likely to make good sense because of the savings it provides in other areas. The real problem is that the cost is in a highly visible category (space and services), while the offsetting advantage is in poorly measured and therefore invisible categories (increased productivity and reduced turnover).


Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.

Peopleware (Parte I)

Este libro es excelente en mi opinión, así que he decidido colocar los extractos que me parecen más resaltantes. Todo programador, desarrollador, líder técnico, funcional, arquitecto o jefe de proyecto debería leerlo. Mejor aún si lo compran. Aquí va lo más resaltante de la primera parte:

PART I

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.

The project that has to be done by an impossible fixed date is the very one that can't afford not to have frequent brainstorms and even a project dinner or some such affair to help the individual participants knit into an effective whole.

The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one. That fact is horrifying for anyone concerned about the quality of work in the field; for folks like us who write books, it is positively tragic.

Productivity ought to mean achieving more in an hour of work, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay. There is a large difference. The Spanish Theory managers dream of attaining new productivity levels through the simple mechanism of unpaid overtime. They divide whatever work is done in a week by forty hours, not by the eighty or ninety hours that the worker actually put in.

The Eagle project at Data General is a case in point. The project was a Spanish Theory triumph: Workaholic project members put in endless unpaid overtime hours to push productivity to unheard of levels. At the end of the project, virtually the entire development staff quit.

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 their own job satisfaction.

We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the quality of the product we produce, not the quantity of product, but the quality. Any step you take that may jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of your staff directly against you.

Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines.

The nation (Japan) that is an acknowledged quality leader is also known for its high productivity. The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.

Hewlett-Packard is an example of an organization that reaps the benefits from increased productivity due to high, builder-set quality standards. The company makes a cult of quality. In such an environment, the argument that more time or money is needed to produce a high-quality product is generally not heard. The result is that developers know they are part of a culture that delivers quality beyond what the marketplace requires. Their sense of quality identification works for increased job satisfaction and some of the lowest turnover figures seen anywhere in the industry.

In some Japanese companies, notably Hitachi Software and parts of Fujitsu, 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. Of course, project managers are under the same pressure there that they are here: They're being pressed to deliver something, anything, right away. But enough of a quality culture has been built up so that these Japanese managers know better than to bully their workers into settling for lower quality.

In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don't perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project and the project goals. In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much. When a worker seems unable to perform and seems not to care at all about the quality of his work, for example, it is a sure sign that the poor fellow is overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work. He doesn't need more pressure. What he needs is reassignment, possibly to another company.

"In my early years as a developer, I was privileged to work on a project managed by Sharon Weinberg, now president of the Codd and Date Consulting Group. She was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged myself out of a sick bed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me propped up at the console. She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After she'd poured it into me and buoyed up my spirits, I asked her how she found time for such things with all the management work she had to do. She gave me her patented grin and said, Tom, this is management."


Copyright © 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister.