Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

by DeMarco Tom

Variations on the story of the spaghetti dinner have been told to us in different forms and about different managers for years. The common thread is that good managers provide frequent easy opportunities for the team to succeed together. The opportunities may be tiny pilot subprojects, or demonstrations, or simulations, anything that gets the team quickly into the habit of succeeding together.

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.

This scheme gave people two unusual degrees of freedom: They got to choose the projects they worked on and the people they worked with. The surprising finding was that the first of these factors didn’t matter very much. Management initially feared that only the glamorous projects would be bid for, but it didn’t happen that way. Even the most mundane projects were bid for. What seemed to matter was the chance for people to work with those they wanted to work with.

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. An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority. It says, “Recognize me as a different caste of creature, a manager. I belong to the thinking class. Those beneath me are employed to carry out my decisions.”

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. There is a holistic integrity to their method, and so it’s hard to break down and analyze the component parts (how the parts fit together into a whole is more important than what the parts are).

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.

The judgment that a still-imperfect product is “good enough” is the death knell for a jelling team.

Your marketplace, your product consumers, your clients, and your upper management are never going to make the case for high quality. Extraordinary quality doesn’t make good short-term economic sense. 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. In the long run, this always pays off. People get high on quality and outdo themselves to protect it.

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. Such a manager may contrive to deliver a product in twenty versions, even though two are sufficient for upper management and the user.

This idea is upsetting to managers who pride themselves on their leadership. Isn’t the manager supposed to supply leadership, to function as quarterback, spiriting the team on to victory through judicious play selection and split-second timing? That may sound good, but the team that needs that much leadership isn’t functioning very well as a team. 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.

Responsibility: If something goes wrong on a Methodology effort, the fault is with the Methodology, not the people. (The Methodology, after all, made all of the decisions.) Working in such an environment is virtually responsibility-free. People want to accept responsibility, but they won’t unless given acceptable degrees of freedom to control their own success.

Introduction of a Methodology opens up the possibility of work-to-rule actions in still more parts of the economy. People might actually do exactly what the Methodology says, and the work would grind nearly to a halt.

Most of the benefits claimed on behalf of Methodologies are really benefits of convergence of method. To the extent that different people doing the same work converge on the same methods and use them the same way, there can be real advantages. Maintenance personnel will be able to relate more quickly to new products, developers will be able to move onto new projects and get up to speed more quickly, metrics will be consistently defined from one effort to another, and certain kinds of failures will be more readily detectable. Convergence of method is a good thing. But Methodologies are not the only way to achieve convergence.

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 tendency toward convergence.

That seems like common sense to us, but it goes against the industry-wide convention of hunting out new approaches and imposing them as standards before anyone in the organization has even tried them out.

This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they’re trying something new.

With only a modicum of cynicism, we subscribe to the view that the Hawthorne Effect accounts for most productivity gains.

Here’s the rub: The technology that is so evident at meetings today does not facilitate the meeting at all; it merely provides an escape for people from the pointlessness of what’s happening around them. What the technology enhances is the dreadfulness of meetings. Our meetings are worse today than they were a generation ago, because a generation ago people wouldn’t have been able to bear them—they would have revolted. Behavior that we take for granted today would have gotten you fired a generation ago.

It establishes for everyone that the boss is boss, that he or she gets to run the meeting, that attendance is expected, that the hierarchy is being respected.

It is a sad comment on the prevailing culture in development organizations that, in spite of all the talk about “lean and mean,” it is politically unsafe for a manager to run a project leanly staffed through the key analysis and design activities.

Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it also has another insidious effect: It is guaranteed to waste the individual’s time. A worker with multiple assignments—a little new development, some maintenance of a legacy product, some sales support, and perhaps a bit of end user hand-holding—will spend a significant part of each day switching gears.

A family therapist will tell you that when one person in a relationship over-functions, the others are sure to under-function. When one sibling leaps up to clear the table and wash the dishes, you’re liable to see the others slipping off to do something more amusing. Could that be happening in your organization? When you over-coordinate the people who work for you, they’re all too likely to under-coordinate their own efforts.

A decent coach understands that his or her job is not to coordinate interaction, but to help people learn to self-coordinate.

If someone sends you an e-mail that proposes to do some wacky thing and you don’t object, under this rule you have effectively given your consent. If you find yourself spending hours each day reading through stuff that is of no real value to you, chances are it is because you have to worry about your consent being taken for granted because your name was on the CC line.

To free yourself and everyone else of this drudgery, you need to repeal the rule. Without knowing the ins and outs of your organization, we can’t say how you need to go about it. But it’s worth doing. An effective repeal—establishing that only explicit consent gives consent—could save your organization person-centuries of wasted time.

“People hate change . . . and that’s because people hate change. . . . I want to be sure that you get my point. People really hate change. They really, really do.” —Steve McMenamin Principal, The Atlantic Systems Guild

We need to talk about change because it is our business. More than being just system builders, we are change agents. Every time we deliver a new system, we are obliging people to change the way they do their work; we might be redefining their jobs entirely. We are demanding that they change, and while we’re at it, our own organizations are demanding that we change, too. The emerging technologies and the building cycle-time pressures are forcing us to change how we build our products.

And the uncertainty is more compelling than the potential for gain.

The real irony is that when I did report back, I took the list of failures and asked if anybody was using those methods or tools regularly. I got a positive response on every single one. Everything works, and everything fails. What is going on here?

They will withdraw their support as quickly as they give it in order to hop on some new bandwagon.

These on-the-fence, maybe-baby allies are never going to be swayed solely by a rational discussion of why the proposed new way will be so much better than the current situation. Here is something to repeat to yourself whenever you set out to ask people to change: As systems developers, we have selected ourselves into the world of cool, calming, rational thought. Either our code compiles, or it doesn’t. The compiler is never happy for us, nor mad at us. Perhaps this is why we tend to apply logic as our main device for resolving disputes.

When you try to institute change, the first thing you hit is Chaos. You’ve been there before. It’s when you are convinced that you are worse off than before with this new tool, new procedure, or new technique. People are saying things like, “If we just jettison this new stuff, maybe we’ll get back on schedule. . . .”

Zuora circa 2017-2018

It is frustrating and embarrassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. Nobody enjoys that sense of floundering; you just know you would be better off with the old way. Unfortunately, this passage through Chaos is absolutely necessary, and it can’t be shortcut.

You have reached the New Status Quo when what you changed to becomes what you do. 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.

The reason the Satir model is so important is that it alerts us that Chaos is an integral part of change. With the more naïve two-stage model, we don’t expect Chaos. When it occurs, we mistake it for the New Status Quo. And since the New Status Quo seems so chaotic, we think, “Whoops, looks like we blew it; let’s change back.” The change-back message is bound to be heard loud and clear in the middle of any ambitious change. When you’re looking for it, your chances of dealing sensibly with it are much improved.

Our natural fear of Chaos may help to explain why learning something as a child appears so much easier than learning the same thing as an adult.

Paradoxically, change only has a chance of succeeding if failure—at least a little bit of failure—is also okay.

Some organizations can learn and some can’t. Some can learn a lesson in the abstract but can’t change themselves to take advantage of what they have learned. Some can learn, but the pace of their learning is offset by the pace of their unlearning.

It’s tempting to say that it happens at the top. But tops of organizations, in our experience, are not so much focused on day-to-day operations. Presidents of large- to medium-size companies, for example, may spend most of their time making acquisitions (or fighting them off). There is a nice, egalitarian ring to the notion that the learning center might be at the bottom. But don’t count on this happening in the real world. People at the bottom are typically too constrained by the organizational boundaries, and might be blind to important possibilities. In any event, they rarely have the power to effect change.

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.

Almost all companies have something they call the Management Team, typically made up of middle-management peers. As we observed earlier, applying the word team to a group doesn’t assure that it will have any of the characteristics of a team. It may still be a poorly knit collection of individuals who have no common goals, common values, or blended skills. This is usually the case with most so-called management teams.

To make matters worse, they don’t have the one thing that any team needs in order to jell: common ownership of the work product. Anything that gets accomplished in such a group is likely to be the accomplishment of one of its members, not the group as a whole. The more competitive the managers are, the more pronounced this effect. We have even encountered extreme cases in which the rule was: “If something looks good, grab it; if you can’t grab it, kill it.”

If, on the other hand, the white space is empty of communication and common purpose, learning comes to a standstill. Organizations in which middle managers are isolated, embattled, and fearful are nonstarters in this respect.

In extreme cases, the charter is a blank check; if your corporation is fortunate enough to have a self-motivated super-achiever on board, it’s enough to say, “Define your own job.” Our colleague Steve McMenamin characterizes these workers as “free electrons,” since they have a strong role in choosing their own orbits.

Management recognized that the company needed someone looking into all the directions we weren’t currently following, hence my unstructured charter. It puts me into the import business, constantly on the lookout for new ways the technology could help us.

The whole idea of a loose charter can backfire, too, as it has at Xerox. Some of the best people there got to feel that the company was never going to use the good ideas they were coming up with [at PARC], and so they left.”

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.