Skimming : Peopleware
Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)
MANAGING THE HUMAN RESOURCE
Somewhere Today, A Project is Failing
- For the overwhelming majority of the
bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single
technological issue to explain the failure, (p.4)
- The major problems of our work are
not so much technological as sociological in nature. (p.4)
- 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. (p.5)
Make A Cheeseburger, Sell A Cheeseburger
- Development is inherently different
from production. But managers of development and allied efforts often
allow their thinking to be shaped by a management philosophy derived
entirely from a production environment. (p.7)
- The "make a cheeseburger, sell a
cheeseburger" mentality can be fatal in your development area. (p.7)
- Fostering an atmosphere that doesn't
allow for error simply makes people defensive. ... The average level of
technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit
error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously. (p.8)
- You may be able to kick people to
make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and
thoughtful. (p.9)
- 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. (p.11)
- The more heroic the effort required, the more important it is
that the team members learn to interact well and enjoy it (p.12)
Vienna Waits for You
- 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. (p.14)
- Your people are very aware of the
one short life that each person is allotted. And they know too well
that there has got to be something more important than the silly job
they're working on. (p.15)
- Throughout the effort there will be
more or less an hour of undertime for every hour of overtime. The
trade-off might work to your advantage for the short term, but for the
long term it will cancel out (p.15)
- Productivity has to be defined as
benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and
revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including
replacement of any workers used up by the effort. (p.18)
- A schedule that the project could
actually meet was of no value to those Spanish Theory managers, because
it didn't put the people under pressure. Better to have a hopelessly
impossible schedule to extract more labor from the workers. (p.18)
- People under time pressure don't work better; they Just work
faster. (p.18)
Quality—If Time Permits
- There may be many and varied causes
of emotional reaction in one's personal life, but in the workplace, the
major arouser of emotions is threatened self-esteem. (p.19)
- Any step you take that may
jeopardize the quality of the product is likely to set the emotions of
your staff directly against you. (p.19)
- In many cases, you may be right
about the market, but the decision to pressure people into delivering a
product that doesn't measure up to their own quality standards is
almost always a mistake. (p.20)
- The point here is that the client's
perceived needs for quality in the product are often not as great as
those of the builder. There is a natural conflict. (p.21)
- Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to
higher productivity. (p.22)
Parkinson's Law Revisited
- 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. (p.25)
- The most surprising part of the 1985
Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, ... Projects on which
the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever ("Just wake me up when
you're done.") had the highest productivity of all. (p.29)
- Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working
day. (p.29)
Laetrile
- People who are desperate enough
don't look very hard at the evidence. Similarly, lots of managers are
"desperate enough," and their desperation makes them easy victims of a
kind of technical laetrile that purports to improve productivity.(p.30)
- The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make
it possible for people to work. (p.34)
THE OFFICE ENVIRONMENT
The Furniture Police
- But people work better in natural
light. They feel better in windowed space and that feeling translates
directly into higher quality of work. (p.40)
- Almost without exception, the
workspaces given to intellect workers are noisy, interruptive,
unprivate, and sterile. (p.40)
- Police-mentality planners design workplaces the way they would
design prisons: optimized for containment at minimal cost. (p.40)
"You Never Get Anything Done Around Here
between 9 and 5"
- Staying late or arriving early or
staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office
environment. (p.43)
- If you participate in or manage a team of people who need to use
their brains during the work day, then the workplace environment is
your business. (p.50)
Saving Money on Space
- ... minimum accommodation for the
mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:
- 100 square feet of dedicated
space per worker
- 30 square feet of work surface
per person
- noise protection in the form of
enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions
(p.53)
- Noise is directly proportional to
density, so halving the allotment of space per person can be expected
to double the noise. (p.56)
- People are hiding out to get some work done. If this rings true
to your organization, it's an indictment. Saving money on space may be
costing you a fortune. (p.57)
Intermezzo : Productivity Measurement and
Unidentified Flying Objects
- In order to make the concept deliver
on its potential, management has to be perceptive and secure enough to
cut itself out of the loop. That means the data on individuals is not
passed up to management, and everybody in the organization knows it.
(p.61)
- The individuals are inclined to do exactly the same things with
the data that the manager would do. They will try to improve the things
they do less well or try to specialize in the areas where theyalready
excel. (p.61)
Brain Time Versus Body Time
- Thirty percent of the time, people
are noise sensitive, and the rest of the time, they are noise
generators. (p.62)
- Flow is a condition of deep, nearly
meditative involvement. ... 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. (p.63)
- 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.
(p.64)
- What matters is not the amount of
time you're present, but the amount of time that you're -working at
full potential. (p.65)
- Whenever the number of uninterrupted hours is a reasonably high
proportion of total hours, up to approximately forty percent, then the
environment is allowing people to get into flow when they need to.
E-Factor = Uninterrupted Hours / Body-Present Hours (p.66)
The Telephone
- Do you often interrupt a discussion
with co-workers or friends to answer a phone? Of course you do. You
don't even consider not answering the phone. Yet what you're doing is a
violation of the common rules of fairness, taking people out of order,
just because they insist loudly (BBBRRRRHINNNNGGGGG!) on your
attention. (p.71)
- The big difference between a phone
call and an electronic mail message is that the phone call interrupts
and the e-mail does not; (p.73)
- People must learn that it's okay sometimes not to answer their
phones, and they must learn that their time—not just the quantity but
its quality—is important. (p.74)
Bring Back The Door
- The most obvious symbol of success
is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise
and mterruptability to suit their changing needs. The most obvious
symbol of failure is the paging system. (p.75)
- What is more relevant is whether the
workplace lets you work or inhibits you. Work-conducive office space is
not a status symbol, it's a necessity. (p.77)
- The creative leap involves
right-brain function. If the right brain, is busy listening to 1001
Strings on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost. (p.79)
- The inconvenient fact of life is that the best workplace is not
going to be infinitely replicable. Vital work-conducive space for one
person is not exactly the same as that for someone else. (p.80)
Taking Umbrella Steps
- Christopher Alexander, architect and
philosopher, is best known for his observations on the design
process. ... His philosophy of interior space is a compelling one. It
helps you to understand what it is that has made you love certain
spaces and never feel comfortable in others. (p.82)
- Alexander has very little patience
with windowless space: "Rooms without a view are like prisons for the
people who have to stay in them." (p.87)
- If you've ever had the opportunity
to work in space that had an outdoor component, it's hard to imagine
ever again limiting yourself to working entirely indoors. (p.89)
- At the entrance to the workplace
should be some area that belongs to the whole group. It constitutes a
kind of hearth for the group. (p.89)
- A common element that runs through all the patterns (both ours
and Alexander's) is reliance upon non-replicable formulas. No two
people have to have exactly the same workspace. (p.90)
THE RIGHT PEOPLE
The Hornblower Factor
- All of this means that getting the
right people in the first place is all-important. (p.96)
- You're hiring on behalf of the whole
corporate ladder above you. The perceived norm of these upper managers
is working on you each time you consider making a new offer. That
almost unsensed pressure is pushing toward the company average,
encouraging you to hire people that look like, sound like, and think
like everybody else. (p.97)
- In the corporation or other
organization, entropy can be thought of as uniformity of attitude,
appearance, and thought process. (p.99)
- SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT: Entropy is always
increasing in the organization. (p.99)
Hiring A Juggler
- It would be ludicrous to think of
hiring a juggler without first seeing him perform. (p.100)
- The aptitude tests we've seen are
mostly left-brain oriented. That's because the typical things new hires
do are performed largely in the left brain. The things they do later on
in their career, however, are to a much greater degree right-brain
activities. (p.103)
- So the hiring process needs to focus
on at least some sociological and human communication traits. The best
way we've discovered to do this is through the use of auditions for job
candidates. (p.103)
- But it doesn't follow that aptitude
tests are no good or that you ought not to be using them. You should
use them, just not for hiring. (p.103)
- It soon became clear that the audition process served to
accelerate the socialization process between a new hire and the
existing staff members. (p.104)
Happy to be Here
- Employee turnover costs about twenty
percent of all manpower expense. But that's only the visible cost of
turnover. ... 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. (p.106)
- 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.) (p.108)
- ... a few reasons account for most
departures:
- a just-passing-through
mentality: Co-workers engender no feelings of long-term involvement in
the job.
- a feeling of disposability:
Management can only think of its workers as interchangeable parts
(since turnover is so high, nobody is indispensable).
- a sense that loyalty would be
ludicrous: Who could be loyal to an organization that views its people
as parts?
(p. 108)
- But in the best organizations, the
short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is
being best. And that's a long-term concept. (p.111)
- A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is
widespread retraining. ... They realize that retraining helps to build
the mentality of permanence that results in low turnover and a strong
sense of community. They realize that it more than justifies its cost.
(p.112)
The Self-Healing System
- When you automate a previously
all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic. The new system is
capable of making only those responses planned explicitly by its
builders. So the self-healing quality is lost. (p.113)
- The maddening thing about most of
our organizations is that they are only as good as the people who staff
them. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get around that natural limit,
and have good organizations even though they were staffed by mediocre
or incompetent people? Nothing could be easier—all we need is (trumpet
fanfare, please) a Methodology. (p.114)
- There is a big difference between
Methodology and methodology. Small m methodology is a basic approach
one takes to getting a job done. It doesn't reside in a fat book, but
rather inside the heads of the 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. (p.115)
- Of course, if your people aren't
smart enough to think their way through their work, the work will fail.
No Methodology will help. (p.116)
- Convergence of method is a good
thing. But Methodologies are not the only way to achieve convergence.
(p.118)
- Better ways to achieve convergence
of method are
- Training: People do what they
know how to do. If you give them all a common core of methods, they
will tend to use those methods.
- Tools: A few automated aids for
modeling, design, implementation, and test will get you more
convergence of method than all the statutes you can pass.
- Peer Review: In organizations
where there are active peer review mechanisms (quality circles,
walkthroughs,inspections, technology fairs), there is a natural
tendencytoward convergence.
(p.118)
- It's only after this kind of gently guided convergence that you
may think of publishing a standard. You can't really declare something
a standard until it has already become a de facto standard. ... In that
company's standards manual, it defines a standard as "a proven method
for undertaking a repeated task." The manual goes on to explain that
proven means "demonstrated widely and successfully within DuPont."
(p.118)
GROWING PRODUCTIVE TEAMS
The Whole is Greater than The Sum of The Parts
- The reasons for this effect are not
so complex: Teams by their very nature are formed around goals. ...
Prior to a team's jelling, the individuals on the team might have had a
diversity of goals. But as part of the jelling process, they have all
bought on to the common goal. (p.123)
- There is very little true teamwork
required in most of our work. But teams are still important, for they
serve as a device to get everyone pulling in the same direction. The
purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.
(p.126)
- The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that
people take in their work. Jelled teams just feel healthy. The
interactions are easy and confident and warm. (p.127)
The Black Team
- The Black Team was initially made up
of people who had proved themselves to be slightly better at testing
than their peers. They were slightly more motivated. (p.130)
- The team was a success. It succeeded as a test group, but more
important for our purposes here, it succeeded as a social unit. People
on the team got such a kick out of what they were doing that colleagues
outside the team were positively jealous. (p.131)
Teamicide
- So instead of looking for ways to
make team formation possible, we began to think of ways to make it
impossible. (p.133)
- You can't protect yourself against
your own people's incompetence. If your staff isn't up to the job at
hand, you will fail. Of course, if the people are badly suited to the
job, you should get new people. But once you've decided to go with a
given group, your best tactic is to trust them. (p.133)
- People who feel untrusted have
little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team. (p.135)
- Physical separation of people who
are expected to interact closely doesn't make much sense anyway.
Neighboring workers are a source of noise and disruption. When they're
all on the same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time,
so there is less interruption of flow. (p.136)
- No one can be part of multiple
jelled teams. The tight interactions of the jelled team are exclusive.
Enough fragmentation and teams just won't jell. The saddest thing is we
allow far more fragmentation than is really necessary. (p.137)
- Co-workers who are developing a
shoddy product don't even want to look each other in the eye, There is
no joint sense of accomplishment in store for them. They know that
there will be a general sense of relief when they can stop doing what
they're doing. At the end of the project, they'll make every effort to
separate themselves from other members of the group, and get on to
better things. (p.137)
- But there are certainly cases where
a tight but not impossible deadline can constitute an enjoyable
challenge to the team. What's never going to help, however, is a phony
deadline. (p.138)
- The team phenomenon, as we've described it, is something that
happens only at the bottom of the hierarchy. ... When managers are
bonded into teams, it's only because they serve dual roles: manager on
the one hand and group member on the other. (p.139)
A Spaghetti Dinner
- The common thread is that good
managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed
together. (p.141)
- The best boss is the one who can manage this over and over again
without the team members knowing they've been "managed." (p.142)
Open Kimono
- This Open Kimono attitude is the
exact opposite of defensive management. You take no steps to defend
yourself from the people you've put into positions of trust. And all
the people under you are in positions of trust. A person you can't
trust with any autonomy is of no use to you. (p.144)
- They're not just getting a job done.
They're making sure that the trust that's been placed in them is
rewarded. It is this kind of Open Kimono management that gives teams
their best chance to form. (p.145)
- 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. (p.146)
- What seemed to matter was the chance
for people to work with those they wanted to work with. (p.148)
- Between master craftsman and apprentice there is a bond of
natural authority—the master knows how to do the work and the
apprentice does not. Submitting to this kind of authority demeans no
one, it doesn't remove incentive, it doesn't make it impossible to knit
with fellow workers. (p.148)
Chemistry For Team Formation
- In organizations with the best
chemistry, managers devote their energy to building and maintaining
healthy chemistry. Departments and divisions that glow with health do
so because their managers make it happen. (p.150)
- The opposite attitude, of "only
perfect is close enough for us," gives the team a real chance. This
cult of quality is the strongest catalyst for team formation. It binds
the team together because it sets them apart from the rest of the
world. The rest of the world, remember, doesn't give a hoot for
quality. (p.151)
- When team members develop a cult of
quality, they always turn out something that's better than what their
market is asking for. They can do this, but only when protected from
short-term economics. (p.152)
- The chemistry-building manager takes
pains to divide the work into pieces and makes sure that each piece has
some substantive demonstration of its own completion. ... Each new
version is an opportunity for closure. Team members get warmed up as
the moment approaches, they sprint near the very end. (p.152)
- A jelled team does have the effect
of making people more productive and goal-directed. And you do give up
some control, or at least the illusion of control, when it jells. The
team begins to feel elite in some way or other, with all members of the
team sharing in the sense of eliteness. (p.154)
- 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. (p.155)
ITS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN TO WORK HERE
Chaos And Order
- One caveat about pilot projects:
Don't experiment with more than one aspect of development technology on
any given project. (p.161)
- From four years of running our
Coding War Games, we have learned that the sometimes raucous,
competitive, no-lose experience can be a delightful source of
constructive disorder. (p.162)
- There can be no question that good sense and order are desirable
components of our work day. There's also a place for adventure,
silliness, and small amounts of constructive disorder. (p.166)
Free Electrons
- It's hardly hot news these days that
lots of our peers are working as cottage industry entrepreneurs. They
contract their time by the day or week for programming or design work
or sometimes management. (p.167)
- Organizations are under increasing
pressure to offer attractive in-house alternatives to their best people
lest they become part of the cottage industry phenomenon. One such
alternative is a position with loosely stated responsibilities so that
the individual has a strong say in defining the work. (p.168)
- Our colleague Steve McMenamin
characterizes these workers as "free electrons," since they have a
strong role in choosing their own orbits. (p.168)
- The reason there are so many gurus
and Fellows and intrapreneurs and internal consultants in healthy
modern companies is quite simply that companies profit from them.
(p.168)
- 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. (p.170)
Holgar Dansk
- 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. (p.172)
- There may be a sleeping giant inside your own organization,
ready to awaken when it is in danger. It is in danger if there is too
much entropy, too little common sense. The giant is the body of your
co-workers and subordinates, rational men and women whose patience is
nearly exhausted. (p.173)
SON OF PEOPLEWARE
Teamicide Revisited
- These motivational accessories, as
they are called (including slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key
chains, and awards), are a triumph of form over substance. (p.178)
- Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway.
The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side
effects. (p.180)
Competition
- At the extreme, at least,
competition is certain to inhibit team jell. (p.181)
- What is the long-term effect of
heightened competition among people who need to work together? One of
the first victims is the easy, effective peer-coaching that is
ubiquitous in healthy teams. (p.182)
- When you observe a well-knit team in
action, you'll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going
on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge.
When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their
roles tend to switch back and forth over time ... (p.182)
- 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. (p.184)
Process Improvement Programs
- Standards are good. ... but it's
worth pointing out that the great triumph of standards in the modern
world is almost entirely the success of standard interfaces. ... how it
interfaces with its corresponding parts—but nothing about the process
for building that product. (p.187)
- 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. (p.188)
- 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. (p.189)
- 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. (p.189)
- One of the strongest justifications
for the CMM is that it will raise quality and productivity while
decreasing risk .... Organizations become more and more averse to risk
as they "mature." An organization under the gun to demonstrate
increased CMM level is not going to go looking for real
challenge. (p.190)
- Raising the bar means that risk will
increase. The more proficient you are, the more risk you take on. You'd
be crazy not to (p.191)
- As we make real progress in process
improvement, we need more talented and more experienced people to do
the work (p.191)
- You need as much proficiency as you can possibly build into your
organization. You need that in order to take on ever-more risky
projects. The Key Process Areas, as identified by the SEI, will be
useful to you in building proficiency; they define sets of skills that
ought to be on any good software manager's wish list. Focus on the KPA
skills, but do whatever you can to turn off the institutional
score-keeping. (p.192)
Making Change Possible
- "You don't get it. I'm sorry, but
people really, truly hate change. That's the problem: They're not
rejecting a particular change on its merits; they're rejecting any
change. And that's because people hate change." (p.194)
- Johnson asserts that the Believers
but Questioners are the only meaningful potential allies of any change.
The two extremes, Blindly Loyal and Militantly Opposed, are the real
enemies. (p.197)
- MANTRA: The fundamental response to
change is not logical, but emotional. (p.197)
- Instead, we need to celebrate the
old as a way to help change happen. (p.198)
- When you try to institute change,
the first thing you hit is Chaos. ... You are suffering from the dip in
the learning curve, and the assessment that the change is the problem
may well be right, at least for the moment. You are worse off, for now.
This is part of the reason why response to change is so emotional.
(p.199)
- An interesting characteristic of
human emotion is that the more painful the Chaos, the greater the
perceived value of the New Status Quo—if you can get there. (p.200)
- Change won't even get started unless
people feel safe—and people feel safe when they know they will not be
demeaned or degraded for proposing a change, or trying to get through
one. (p.200)
- Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if
failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay. (p.201)
Human Capital
- An investment, on the other hand, is
use of an asset to purchase another asset. The value has not been used
up, but only converted from one form to another. When you treat an
expenditure as an investment instead of as an expense, you are said to
be capitalizing the expenditure. (p.203)
- Companies of knowledge-workers have to realize that it is their
investment in human capital that matters most. (p.208)
Organizational Learning
- Experience gets turned into learning
when an organization alters itself to take account of what experience
has shown. This alteration takes two forms, which are different enough
to talk about separately:
- The organization instills new
skills and approaches in its people.
- The organization redesigns
itself to operate in some different manner.
(p.210)
- Learning is limited by an
organization's ability to keep its people. (p.210)
- That means the most natural learning
center for most organizations is at the level of that much-maligned
institution, middle management. This squares exactly with our own
observation that successful learning organizations are always
characterized by strong middle management. (p.212)
- In order for a vital learning center to form, middle managers
must communicate with each other and learn to work together in
effective harmony. This is an extremely rare phenomenon. (p.212)
The Ultimate of Management Sins is ...
- The ultimate management sin is
wasting people's time. (p.215)
- Organizations have need of ceremony.
It's perfectly reasonable to call a meeting with a purpose that is
strictly ceremonial, particularly at project milestones, when new
people come on board, or for celebrating good work by the group. Such
meetings do not waste anyone's time. ... Ceremonial meetings that only
celebrate the bossness of the boss, however, are a waste. (p.217)
- Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it also
has another insidious effect: It is guaranteed to waste the
individual's time. (p.220)
The Making of Community
- 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. (p.223)
- An organization that succeeds in
building a satisfying community tends to keep its people. When the
sense of community is strong enough, no one wants to leave. (p.224)
- Like any work of art, your success at fostering community is
going to require substantial talent, courage, and creativity. It will
also need an enormous investment of time. The work will not be
completed by you alone; at best, you will be the catalyst. (p.225)
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