What I've Been Reading

Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. A master piece oozing with practical wisdom. It's very tempting and teasing but unfortunately it would take another Manhattan project to get rid of the bullshit that goes on even in the smallest corporation. But yet.. we ought to try and keep trying... talk about self-deception in human life !!

• The cause of failure most frequently cited by our survey participants was “politics.”   But now observe that people tend to use this word rather sloppily. Included under “politics”   are such unrelated or loosely related things as communication problems, staffing problems, disenchantment with the boss or with the client, lack of motivation, and high turnover. People often use the word politics to describe any aspect of the work that is people-related, but the English language provides a much more precise term for these effects: They constitute the project’s sociology. The truly political problems are a tiny and pathological subset.
• The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
• Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions. 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. Getting the new disk drive installed is positively trivial compared to figuring out why Horace is in a blue funk or why Susan is dissatisfied with the company after only a few months.
• For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work. But there can be an almost Biblical association between error on the job and sin. This is an attitude we need to take specific pains to change.
• Fostering an atmosphere that doesn’t allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don’t try things that may turn out badly. You encourage this defensiveness when you try to systematize the process, when you impose rigid methodologies so that staff members are not allowed to make any of the key strategic decisions lest they make them incorrectly. The average level of technology may be modestly improved by any steps you take to inhibit error. The team sociology, however, can suffer grievously.
• 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 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.
• People under time pressure don’t work better —   they just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and of their own job.
• The real message of the linked quality and productivity effects needs to be presented in slightly different terms: Quality Is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.
• Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (“ Just wake me up when you’re done.”) had the highest productivity of all.
• The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.
• As long as workers are crowded into noisy, sterile, disruptive space, it’s not worth improving anything but the workplace.
• Many of the everyday tasks performed by professional workers are done in the serial processing center of the left brain. Music will not interfere particularly with this work, since it’s the brain’s holistic right side that digests music. But not all of the work is centered in the left brain. There is that occasional breakthrough that makes you say “Ahah!” and steers you toward an ingenious bypass that may save months or years of work.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.
• The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. 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.)
• People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new.
• Part of our scaling down of expectations involved a change in vocabulary. 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 sweating it out again. That’s pretty close to how team formation works.
• 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.
• 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.
• In general, it may help to remind people that any improvement involves change: You can never improve if you can’t change at all. 
• Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure– at least a little bit of failure– is also okay.