Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister are principles of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a New York and London based consulting firm. They have several books published over the years and have been writing, consulting, and lecturing internationally since 1979 on topics such as estimating levels of productivity, effective management, and corporate culture.
The central theme of this book is the human resource as introduced by the first chapter. After all, a corporation is only as great as the humans that sustain it. However, the proper management of this resource is debatable. Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister present an interesting perspective on the human corporate culture. A wide variety of existing theories and themes from one software firm to another crisscross the pages. Every chapter has attention grabbing quotes and observations from real-life situations. More importantly, it addresses the behavior of a manager attempting to generate a productive team without sacrificing low turnover, human sanity, team-jelling, or plain old fun. The method of sustaining the happy productive team is presented in the next chapters as the office environment, the right people, growing productive teams, it’s supposed to be fun to work here, and son of peopleware as an extension on the previous chapters.
The central theme of the office environment is the great ability of the office to prevent actual work. Workers are constantly distracted by paperwork, people, phones, noise, paging, and a fractured group. There is little time for actual work time to get done. Real solid work aka “The Flow” is constantly disturbed by the variety of distractions that supplementary organizations have created to save money on the working space and impress uniformity. Each disturbance of real work requires time for the worker to reset themselves into the their thinking mode. There is an entire micro chapter on the BellOPhone, which is a satirical recreation of why an annoying loud unignorable device was placed upon one’s desk. Furthermore, the average worker enters the modern “9 to 5” zoo for the purpose of supplementary tasks that do not define actual work. In the end, the developer takes refuge in conference rooms, cafeterias, and at home. It is a fractured group mentality. Everyone is actually trying to avoid coming to work and sitting near the people that are needed the most, that is if you are actually placed near your project unit and not in the middle of HR.
Who are the right people? Just because a person does not perform well at the task at hand does not make that person an incompetent individual all together. Sometimes, it is a matter of the right person for the right job. Once you have that happy person in the correct position, you’ve got to keep them there as log as possible. In other words, low turnover for the right people. Finally, the glue-all of varying individuals is consistent methodology. This is not to say that everyone dresses in black polyester suits each day. Rather, consistent training and tools will allow coordinated singularity without the pain of edict via memo, form gluttony, and malicious compliance.
Grow a productive team. That statement alone is almost enough. A team does not always fall into place with perfect harmony. Instead, a team must jell or learn to jell. Each person can bring something to the table. The jelled team develops identity and common goal alignment. At times, this can push the manager’s self confidence as the team takes on a life of its own that may take on certain aspects of the manager. Rather, the team is supposed to lead from time to time with the manager clearing away administrative blockades to proper work flow. This is not to say that a group of exclusion or a “clique” is the same as a team. Managers may label the properly jelled team as a clique, but it is simple insecurity stemming from the manager sitting apart from the team. Once everyone on the team has found their spot and contributed their piece of the work flow puzzle, then the team is positioned to crank out milestones. Organizations with consistent instances of jelled teams continue to be successful.
Fun in the workplace? The very idea seems strange to our work-addicted lifestyles. Although, if one is working in the field of software engineering, then software engineering is the thing that one should like to do. One’s coworkers are in the same boat. In this manner, the manager may bring in a tool for jelling. This tool is fun. People have a much easier time relating or empathizing with their team when they are brought together by a pleasant experience. Several examples given are coding competitions, luncheons, and safe humor. However, if the workplace, coworkers, and team differences over arch the team community, then the workplace may often revolt with small gestures. Several small humorous examples of workers disassembling paging systems, quieting phones, and refusing to move into a compressed homogeneous workplace.
At this point, the son of peopleware continues to reiterate many of the ideas from the previous chapters, but with a new light. It addresses proper managerial techniques for productive work flow. In this capacity, the manager has the responsibility of respecting his/her team as an investment in capital, his/her team’s time, and his/her team’s ability to learn new techniques.
Although this book was not directly associated with my current work. It was none-the-less enjoyable and grants great empathy to the modern software development team and its management. I found the examples of organizational policy sabotaging the work flow to be funny and interesting. Particularly, when upper management creates policies formatted for PR in order to restrict the ability of employees to do simple things such as cook popcorn, think quietly for a moment, or even ignore one’s phone. The primary issue connecting myself to this book is the team jelling. People must constantly empathize with one’s coworkers and do everything possible to perpetuate good relations among team members. When this coordination breaks down, then no one will have fun, everyone will be defending themselves from attack, and no work will get done.