Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

by DeMarco Tom

In fact, that idea is the underlying thesis of this whole book: The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature. Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they’ve got more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage that way. They manage as though technology were their principal concern. They spend their time puzzling over the most convoluted and most interesting puzzles that their people will have to solve, almost as though they themselves were going to do the work rather than manage it.

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 natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It’s something to be cultivated.

the entire focus of project management ought to be the dynamics of the development effort. Yet the way we assess people’s value to a new project is often based on their steady-state characteristics: how much code they can write or how much documentation they can produce. We pay far too little attention to how well each of them fits into the effort as a whole.

What’s not so easy is keeping in mind an inconvenient truth like this one: 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 work experience.

A policy of “Quality—If Time Permits” will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product.

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

Visiting a few dozen different organizations each year, as we do, quickly convinces you that ignoring such inconvenient facts is intrinsic to many office plans. Almost without exception, the work space given to intellect workers is noisy, interruptive, un-private, and sterile.

Staying late or arriving early or staying home to work in peace is a damning indictment of the office environment. The amazing thing is not that it’s so often impossible to work in the workplace; the amazing thing is that everyone knows it and nobody ever does anything about it.

Most monolithic corporate space can only be understood in terms of its symbolic value to the executives who caused it to be built. This is their mark on the firmament, the lasting accomplishment they leave behind. They gloat, “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Despair, of course, is exactly all you can do. Your cubicle, infinitely repeated to the horizon, leaves you feeling like a numbered cog. Whether it is TransAmerica’s Orwellian tower in San Francisco or AT&T’s Madison Avenue mausoleum, the result is depressingly the same: a sense of suffocation to the individual.

People who wouldn’t think of living in a home without windows end up spending most of their daylight time in windowless work space.

In order to lead without positional authority—without anyone ever appointing you leader—you have to do what Mike does: • Step up to the task. • Be evidently fit for the task. • Prepare for the task by doing the required homework ahead of time. • Maximize value to everyone. • Do it all with humor and obvious goodwill. It also helps to have charisma.

Innovation is a subject whose talk:do ratio is even more out of whack than that of leadership. Upper management in most companies talks a good game on innovation. The party line goes something like this: “We need innovation to survive. It is so important. Its importance simply cannot be overstated. No sir. Innovation is reeealy, reeealy important. And innovation is everybody’s job. In fact, it is probably the most important part of everybody’s job. Listen up, everybody: Get out there and innovate.” Oh, and by the way, • Nobody is given any time to innovate, since everyone is 100-percent busy. • Most innovation that happens anyway is distinctly unwelcome because it requires accommodating change.

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.

Think of imperfect attention at meetings to be more about a dysfunctional meeting culture than about anyone’s work ethic. Stand-up meetings and meetings without open laptops are a way to articulate the contract, but expect such a move to require you to rethink your meeting philosophy, almost certainly a good idea.

What matters more is being best. And that’s a long-term concept.

Let them make some mistakes.

Most managers give themselves excellent grades on knowing when to trust their people and when not to. But in our experience, too many managers err on the side of mistrust. They follow the basic premise that their people may operate completely autonomously, as long as they operate correctly. This amounts to no autonomy at all. The only freedom that has any meaning is the freedom to proceed differently from the way your manager would have proceeded. This is true in a broader sense, too: The right to be right (in your manager’s eyes or in your government’s eyes) is irrelevant; it’s only the right to be wrong that makes you free.

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 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.

As implemented, the idea was that the company would post new projects on a central kiosk. People would form themselves into candidate teams and then “bid” on jobs. If you had a hankering to work with some of your mates, you would put your résumés together and make a joint pitch for the job. The points in your favor were how well-suited you were to the job, how well you complemented each other’s capacities, and how little it would disrupt other work in the company to assign you as a group to this project. The company picked the best-suited team for each job. 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.

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 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. It may even be necessary to conceal some of these interim versions from the client, and build them only for internal confirmation and satisfaction. Each new version is an opportunity for closure. Team members get warmed up as the moment approaches; they sprint near the very end. They get a high from success. It suffuses them with renewed energy for the next step. It makes them feel closer together.

This may offend your sensibilities as a manager, but managers are usually not part of the teams that they manage. Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. The manager is most often outside the team, giving occasional direction from above and clearing away administrative and procedural obstacles. By definition, the manager is not a peer and so can’t be part of the peer group.

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. Any response that will be required must be put there in the first place. If ever the system needs to be healed, that can only be done outside the context of its operation. Maintainers come in to take the system apart and reconstruct it with one or more new planned responses added.

A working meeting is typically called to reach a decision. Who should be invited? That’s easy, the people who need to agree before the decision can be judged made. Nobody else.

A meeting that is ended by the clock is a ceremony. Its purpose is not to get any particular thing decided.

The ultimate management sin is wasting people’s time.

You call a meeting with your staff but arrive late yourself (you had to take an urgent call from your own boss), leaving the others to cool their heels. Or, you let yourself be called out of the meeting for a quick but important chat with the client, and the meeting loses focus without you. Or, you call a meeting and it becomes evident that the meeting itself is a waste of everyone’s time (except possibly your own, the characteristic of many ceremonial meetings).

The trend to create an increasing number of free electron positions is more than just a response to the threat of the cottage industry. 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. The people in these positions contribute disproportionately to the organizations that employ them. They are motivated to make the positions created for them pay off for their companies.