Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

by DeMarco Tom

New sections in this third edition treat some pathologies of leadership that hadn’t been judged pathological before, an evolving culture of meetings, hybrid teams made up of people from seemingly incompatible generations, and a growing awareness that, even now, some of our most common tools are more like anchors than propellers.

Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components.

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.

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. Human interactions are complicated and never very crisp and clean in their effects, but they matter more than any other aspect of the work.

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 opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they’ve been down, and by making sure they understand that “none” is not the best answer. When people blow it, they should be congratulated—that’s part of what they’re being paid for.

We tend to forget that a project’s entire purpose in life is to put itself out of business.

During her 12 years at the company, the woman in question had never worked on a project that had been anything other than a huge success.

Teams naturally jelled better when she was there. She helped people communicate with each other and get along.

Looking back over our own years as managers, we’ve both concluded that we were off-track on this subject. We spent far too much of our time trying to get things done and not nearly enough time asking the key question, “Ought this thing to be done at all?” The steady-state cheeseburger mentality barely even pays lip service to the idea of thinking on the job. Its every inclination is to push the effort into 100-percent do-mode.

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.

That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud—but it’s the state of the art for many American managers. They bully and cajole their people into long hours. They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn’t going to stop just because a project completes a month late). They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, and do anything to get them to work longer and harder.

Each of us has succumbed at one time or another to the short-term tactic of putting people under pressure to get them to work harder. In order to do this, we have to ignore their decreased effectiveness and the resultant turnover, but ignoring bad side effects is easy. What’s not so easy is keeping in mind an inconvenient truth like this one:

Whenever strong emotions are aroused, it’s an indication that one of the brain’s instinctive values has been threatened. A novice manager may believe that work can be completed without people’s emotions ever getting involved, but if you have any experience at all as a manager, you have learned the opposite. Our work gives us plenty of opportunity to exercise the emotions.

Where did all the emotion come from? Without knowing anything about your specific incident, we’re willing to bet that threatened self-esteem was a factor. 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.

They won’t have the option of more people or reduced function. The only thing to give on will be quality. Workers kept under extreme time pressure will begin to sacrifice quality. They will push problems under the rug to be dealt with later or foisted off onto the product’s end user. They will deliver products that are unstable and not really complete. They will hate what they’re doing, but what other choice do they have?

The hard-nosed, real-world manager part of you has an answer to all this: “Some of my folks would tinker forever with a task, all in the name of ‘Quality.’ But the market doesn’t give a damn about that much quality—it’s screaming for the product to be delivered yesterday and will accept it even in a quick-and-dirty state.” 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.

The builders’ view of quality, on the other hand, is very different. Since their self-esteem is strongly tied to the quality of the product, they tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. This is invariably a higher standard than what the market requires and is willing to pay for.

Speaking of software, that industry has accustomed its clients to accept in-house-developed application programs with an average defect density of one to three defects per hundred lines of code! With sublime irony, this disastrous record is often blamed on poor quality consciousness of the builders. That is, those same folks who are chided for being inclined to “tinker forever with a program, all in the name of ‘Quality’” are also getting blamed when quality is low. Let’s put the blame where it belongs. He who pays the piper is calling for a low-quality tune. By regularly putting the development process under extreme time pressure and then accepting poor-quality products, the software user community has shown its true quality standard.

Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather than the builder, is what we call the flight from excellence. A market-derived quality standard seems to make good sense only as long as you ignore the effect on the builder’s attitude and effectiveness.

Tajima and Matsubara, two of the most respected commentators on the Japanese phenomenon: 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.1

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.

Writing in 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson introduced the notion that work expands to fill the time allocated for it, now known as Parkinson’s Law.

If you didn’t know that few managers receive any management training at all, you might think there was a school they all went to for an intensive course on Parkinson’s Law and its ramifications.

The line that there is some magical innovation out there that you’ve missed is a pure fear tactic, employed by those with a vested interest in selling it.

Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure. Response: They won’t—they’ll just enjoy it less.

The manager’s function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Among our findings of what did correlate positively to good performance was this rather unexpected one: It mattered a lot who your pair mate was. If you were paired with someone who did well, you did well, too. If your pair mate took forever to finish, so did you. If your pair mate didn’t finish the exercise at all, you probably didn’t either. For the average competing pair, the performances differed by only 21 percent.

If you peek into a conference room, you may find three people working in silence. If you wander to the cafeteria midafternoon, you’re likely to find folks seated, one to a table, with their work spread out before them. Some of your workers can’t be found at all. 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.

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

Gilb’s Law doesn’t promise you that measurement will be free or even cheap, and it may not be perfect—just better than nothing. —TDM

Work measurement can be a useful tool for method improvement, motivation, and enhanced job satisfaction, but it is almost never used for these purposes. Measurement schemes tend to become threatening and burdensome.

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. Data collected on the individual’s performance has to be used only to benefit that individual. The measurement scheme is an exercise in self-assessment, and only the sanitized averages are made available to the boss.

If ever its confidentiality is compromised, if ever the data is used against even one individual, the entire data collection scheme will come to an abrupt halt.

A few days like that and anybody is ready to look for a new job. 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.

The mechanics of a flow-accounting system are not very complex. Instead of logging hours, people log uninterrupted hours. In order to get honest data, you have to remove the onus from logging too few uninterrupted hours. People have to be assured that it’s not their fault if they can only manage one or two uninterrupted hours a week; rather it’s the organization’s fault for not providing a flow-conducive environment. Of course, none of this data can go to the Payroll Department. You’ll still have to retain some body-present time-reporting for payroll purposes.

When you first start measuring the E-Factor, don’t be surprised if it hovers around zero. People may even laugh at you for trying to record uninterrupted hours: “There is no such thing as an uninterrupted hour in this madhouse.”

At one of our client sites, there was a nearly organic phenomenon of red bandannas on dowels suddenly sprouting from the desks after a few weeks of E-Factor data collection. No one in power had ever suggested that device as an official Do Not Disturb signal; it just happened by consensus. But everyone soon learned its significance and respected it.

A little emphasis on the E-Factor helps to change the corporate culture and make it acceptable to be uninterruptable.

The most important of these is to realize how much we have allowed the telephone to dominate our time allocation.

Most of us now have perfectly acceptable voice-mail and e-mail. The trick isn’t in the technology; it is in the changing of habits. (Gentle reader, please note this recurring theme.) We have to learn to ask, Does this kind of news or question deserve an interrupt? Can I continue to get work done while I wait for an answer? Does this message need immediate recognition? If not, how long can it wait without causing a problem? Once you ask these questions, your best mode of communication is usually pretty obvious.

To the extent that knowledge workers are required to multitask, their managers need to take account of the flow requirements of the different tasks. Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration.

Current situation with some tribes. Trying to simultaneously firefight and lay a foundation.

The next time someone proudly shows you around a newly designed office, think hard about whether it’s the functionality of the space that is being touted or its appearance. All too often, it’s the appearance.

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. 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. Either you pay for it by shelling out what it costs, or you pay for it in lost productivity.

During the 1960s, researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests on the effects of working with music.

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 “1,001 Strings” on Muzak, the opportunity for a creative leap is lost.

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. If you let them, your people will make their space into whatever they need it to be and the result is that it won’t be uniform. Each person’s space and each team’s space will have a definite character of its own.

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. Uniformity has no place in this view. You have to grin and bear it when people put up odd pictures or clutter their desks 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.