Peopleware

I. Managing the human resource

People are different from software.

1. Somewhere today, a project is failing

• 15% of all projects deliver nothing.
• 25% for projects >25 work/years
• Not for technical reasons, "politics" => sociology

2. Make a cheeseburger, sell a cheeseburger

• Errors should be encouraged
• A project objective is to be ended. Therefore, a project is never steady. Therefore, a project is always changing and there is no steady state
• Need to think more about "why" this task needs to be done rather than how the task must be done

3. Vienna waits for you

• Spanish Theory Management: increase productivity by extracting more work for the $
• Mechanizing development, lowering quality, standardizing procedure reduces enjoyment of work

4. Quality-if time permits

• Self-esteem makes people emotional
• Self-esteem is tied to the quality of our work
• Deadlines conflict with quality
• Manager: Market wants time-to-market over quality
• Builders: want to match their past best achieved quality, more than what the market wants
• But quality is a means to productivity

5. Parkinson's law revisited

• "Work expands to fill the time allocated for it"
• Parkinson was a humorist
• Motivated people do not want to work forever in the same task
• The team can motivate people better than the manager
• Productivity by task estimator. No estimate > Systems analyst (unbiased expert) > Programmer > Programmer + supervisor > Supervisor
• Bureaucratic work does expand

6. Laetrile

People are desperate to increase productivity, fall to the seven sirens, seven false hopes of software management

• Missed something obvious: no
• Others are succeeding, you are getting outdated, not using the right programming language, need more automation: technical gains affect just a small part of the total effort
• Need to get to the bottom of the backlog: bottom of the backlog is worthless
• Workers need more pressure

II. The office environment

It's hard to increase productivity, but easy to decrease it

7. The Furniture Police

Optimizing for cost, and uniformity is not productive

8. You never get anything done around here between 9 and 5

Top performers work in quieter, more private, with less interruption, bigger spaces

9. Saving money on space

Cost of workplace is a small past of cost of worker

Intermezzo. Productivity measurement and unidentified flying objects

• Gilb's Law: Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all
• Individual productivity should only be measured by the invidivual

10. Brain time versus body time

Interruptions are expensive

11. The telephone

Ensure people attend their email with reasonable frequency (3/day) to allow prioritizing non-interrupting communication

12. Bring back the door

People work better in quiet environments

13. Taking umbrella steps

• Developers should design the working environment
• Windows
• Provide outdoor space, public space

III. The right people

Get the right people, make them happy, let them work

14. The Hornblower factor

• Difficult to improve people, choose well
• Appearances << capabilities
• Do not hire for uniformity in the company
• No dress codes

15. Hiring a juggler

• Interviews are about performing, not talking
• Portfolios
• Aptitude tests are not for hiring, they are for self-assessment
• Audition on topic related to work selected by the candidate

16. Happy to be here

• Turnover is expensive and leads to short term planning => needs quick promotions, leads to inexperienced people doing the building
• Company moves are the worst
• Good companies *retrain*

17. The self-healing system

• Humans can improvise, automated process cannot
• Big M Methodologies automate: a) No improvisation, so must grow to cover all cases b) Lots of documents
• Big M Methodologies take responsibilities away from people into the Methodology
• Big M Methodologies lead to malicious compliance- follow the Methodology even if it has bad outcomes
• Convergence of methods is good, easier to onboard, etc.
• Achieve convergence of methods by training, tooling and peer review, without forcing a Methodology
• Hawthorne Effect: people perform better when trying new approaches
• Do new things on every project to benefit from the Hawthorne Effect
• But have a 10-page max. standard

IV. Growing productive teams

Teams working as one on a challenge are the objective. Help the team form

18. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts

• Jell: a jelled team is more than the sum of its members. Jelled teams enjoy the work
• Jelled teams have a common objective, low turnover, strong sense of identity, feel elite, join ownership of product, enjoyment

19. The black team

• The black team tested other teams code.
• The black team outlived the original members
• Identity: dressed in black, some evil mustaches, mystique

20. Teamicide

You can't make a team jell, but you can prevent it from jellying:

• Defensive management: preventing people from making mistakes. If the team cannot do the job, they cannot do the job.
• Bureaucracy
• Physical separation
• Fragmentation of people's time: the team must be together most of the time
• Quality reduction of the product: quality jells a team
• Phony deadlines
• Clique control (preventing the team for working together in further projects)

21. A spaghetti dinner

• Small successes lead to bigger successes
• Perform small projects, demos, etc.

22. Open kimono

• Trust the team
• Get them out of the office
• Let skunkworks projects happen
• Let people choose their peers and project
• Natural authority by being competent

23. Chemistry for team formation

Some organizations have environments that favor team formation

Managers do not seem busy nor manage a lot, they maintain the chemistry

Chemistry building:

• Cult of quality
• I told her I loved her when I married her. Provide closure to each task. Small tasks for frequent closure
• The Elite Team. Allow and grant uniqueness.
• On not breaking up the yankees.
• A network model of team behavior. Managers are not part of the team. Occasional leaders inside the team
• Selections from a Chinese menu. Do not have a uniform team

V. It's supposed to be fun to work here

24. Chaos and order

Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder:

• Pilot projects. All projects as pilots, but limit experimentation
• War games
• Brainstorming
• Provocative training experiences
• Training, trips, conferences, celebrations, and retreats.

25. Free electrons

Some people should be left to work at what they want

26. Holgar Dansk

A "sleeping giant" can oppose any bad change

VI. Son of Peopleware

27. Teamicide revisited

• Those damn posters. Motivational posters tell obvious things people already know. It is demeaning
• Overtime: An unanticipated side effect. If someone is exent of overtime, it is even more damaging

28. Competition

Internal competition inhibits jell, Prevents internal coaching. Can come from:

• Annual salary or merit reviews
• Management by objectives
• Praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment
• Awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance
• Performance measurement in almost any form

Musical ensembles are better metaphors of good development teams than sport teams. Individual sport teams members can have differing valoration from the rest of the team

29. Process improvement programs

• Standardized interfaces are good, standardized processes are not
• Goal is a good product, not building it efficiently
• Good products are risky projects, process improvement avoids risky projects
• Better teams do more complex projects, more risk

30. Making change possible

People fear change

Degrees of fear to change:

• Blindly loyal (ask no questions)
• Believers but questioners: skeptics (show me), passive observers (what's in it for me?), opposed (fear of change), opposed (fear of loss of power), militantly opposed (will undermine and destroy)

Blindly loyal can abandon a change for a newer one. Only Believers but questioners can be allies to a change. Work with them to make change successful

elebrate the old system

Phases of change

• Introduce foreign element/catalyst
• Chaos
• Transforming idea (finding the "correct training"/correct way to adopt change)
• Practice & Integration
• New status quo

People need to feel safe for change, there should be room for some failure

31. Human capital

• Money spent of people is only lost if they leave
• Replacing someone is expensive

32. Organizational learning

• Organizations can only learn if people stay for a long time
• Organizations learn when middle management works together without competition and without reporting to upper management

33. The ultimate management sin is...

Wasting people's time:

• Being late for meetings, blocking meetings, inviting people who don't need to be there
• Status reporting meetings
• Early overstaffing (and leads to fragmenting time of people)

34. The making of community

• Aristotelian politics is building communities, extending ethics to a group
• Creatin