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81 " a manager who is 40 percent used up making operations happen is not viewed as 60 percent reclaimable expense. Rather, he/she is viewed as someone doing leadership 60 percent of the time. If there is an incentive to change this formula, it suggests looking for ways to decrease the time spent running operations to free up more capacity for leading the transformation. "
― Tom DeMarco , Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency
82 " If you've been in the software business for any time at all, youknow that there are certain common problems that plague oneproject after another. Missed schedules and creeping requirementsare not things that just happen to you once and then goaway, never to appear again. Rather, they are part of the territory.We all know that. What's odd is that we don't plan our projectsas if we knew it. Instead, we plan as if our past problems arelocked in the past and will never rear their ugly heads again. Ofcourse, you know that isn't a reasonable expectation. "
― Tom DeMarco , Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects
83 " Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change. "
84 " As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance. "
85 " How people feel can be more a factor in the success of a change than what they think. Anxiety of any kind can only complicate the task of change introduction. That’s why the period of sudden decline of corporate fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, perhaps shocked by the vitality of the competition. In retrospect, a far better time to introduce the change would have been back in the period of healthy growth. Growth always carries with it a certain necessity for change. You may have to hire more people, expand to larger quarters, diversify or centralize, all to accommodate your own burgeoning success. But growth feels good; it feels like winning. It even feels good enough to reduce the amount of change resistance. "
86 " So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they’ve done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between. "
― Tom DeMarco , Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams
87 " I’ve called this idea an article of faith. Like religious articles of faith, it is a premise that the believer is obliged to accept without question. In fact, there may even be an element of sin associated with doubt. To a nonbeliever, the premise looks dubious at best, but the faithful must believe. Project managers are taught from their earliest years that striving toward even the most impossible schedule can do no harm. "
88 " The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan. "
89 " But Buyer Corp. still has a role to play in successful completion of the contract: Buyer will almost certainly have to specify requirements for the Somethingorother to make sure it will receive exactly what it wants; it may have responsibility for acceptance-testing the delivered result consistent with the requirement. "
90 " Instead of authority and consequence (the management staples of the factory floor), the best knowledge-work managers are known for their powers of persuasion, negotiation, markers to call in, and their large reserves of accumulated trust. "
91 " I am much more concerned, though, when smaller companies invest outside their own product areas. I see this as bankruptcy of inventiveness. It is particularly evident when companies find themselves with extra leverage due to run-up of their stock price. Their willingness to spend this found capital outside their own backyard is a signal that they have no real vision, no idea of how to grow in the arena that they know best. "
92 " The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others "
93 " That makes good sense if you’re an Indy 500 racer. But you aren’t. (Sorry.) You’re a software project manager. The same mind-set on a software project is a disaster. "
94 " A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. "
95 " The status meeting I’ve portrayed is not really a meeting at all; it’s a ceremony. At a real meeting, n people put their heads together to arrive at some conclusion or to take some new direction that requires the input and participation of all. Taking turns talking to the boss is not a meeting in this sense. It is, rather, a ritual that acknowledges and celebrates the bossness of the boss. There is need for ritual in business, I guess, but let’s at least understand that the weekly status meeting is not really a meeting. "
96 " Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn’t be doing. "
97 " quality is most of all a function of its usefulness. The Corporate Quality Program Real quality has little to do with defects, "
98 " We have become so obsessed with getting rid of people who are burdened with the characterization overhead that we have ended up with organizations where many high-priced knowledge workers and managers are spending as much as a quarter of their time being their own overhead. "
99 " There is no such thing as “healthy” competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative. The necessary collaboration is not limited to the insides of lowest-level teams; there has to be collaboration as well between teams and between and among the organizations the teams belong to. "
100 " A policy of “Quality—If Time Permits” will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product. Hewlett-Packard "
