Reading Peopleware

[This is a very old writeup - some notes and thoughts I gathered while reading the book. This is posted here so that it can be saved for later]

By Srinivas Yermal
Sunday, February 17, 2002

Peopleware
Productive Projects and Teams
By Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, 2nd edition, 1988

"Most of the managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components."

Parkison's law:

In 1954, the British author C. Northcote Parkinson said that the work expands to fill the time allocated for it. This "law" might apply to people who don't enjoy what they do. Or Tom and Timothy note that - organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

Seven False Hopes of software management -

1. There's a new trick you've missed that could send productivity soaring.
   
2. Other managers are getting gains of 100% or 200% or more.
   
3. Technology is moving so swiftly that you're being passed by.
   
4. Changing languages will give you huge gains.
   
5. B'coz of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately
   
6. You automate everything else; isn't it about time you automate away your software development staff?
   
7. Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure.

Gerald McCue with the assitance of IBM area managers designed a study which revealed that -

• 100 sq feet of dedicated space per worker is important
  
• 30 sq feet of work surface per person
  
• noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions

"Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring at all." - Tom Gilb

More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that its okay sometimes to not answer their phones, and they must learn that their time - not just the quantity but its quality - is important. Because once you are out of the flow, you will take close to 15 min. at an average to get back into the flow. And being in the "flow" or "zone" is the most important thing that any intellectual worker needs to get any work done at all.

Management, at its best, should make sure there is enough space, enough quiet, and enough ways to ensure privacy so that people can create their own sensible workspace.

Christopher Alexander's book Notes on the synthesis of Form is considered a kind of holy book by designers of all kinds. Alexander codifies the elements of good architectural design in his three volume set entitled The Timeless Way of Building. Alexander proposes a meta-plan instead of a master plan. It has three parts -

• a philosophy of piecemeal growth
• a set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth
  
• local control of design by those who will occupy the space

Four patterns to improve the institutional space

1. Tailored workspace from a kit - allow people who use it to design it.
   
2. Provide windows
   
3. Indoor and outdoor space
   
4. Public space - At the entrace of the workplace should be some area that belongs to the whole group. An age-old pattern of interior space is one that has a smooth intimacy gradient as you move toward the interior.

"Without communal eating, no human group can hold together. Give each a place where people can eat together. Make the common meal a regular event. In particular, start a common lunch in every workplace so that a genuine meal around a common table (not out of boxes, machines or bags) becomes an important comfortable daily event... In our own work group at the Center, we found this worked most beautifully when we took it in turns to cook the lunch. The lunch became an event; a gathering: something that each of us put our love and energy into."

--A Pattern Language

Formula for success -

1. Get the right people
2. Make them happy so that they dont leave
3. Turn them loose. (This includes the fact that you will coordinate(only) the efforts of the team)

"Popcorn is not professional" - The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. So making and eating popcorn in office cafeteria is unprofessional.

SECOND THERMODYNAMIC LAW OF MANAGEMENT - Entropy (levelness and sameness) is always increasing in the orginization. So your organization may have rigor mortis, but your little piece of it can hop and skip.

Why People leave?

• a just passing through mentality: Co-workers engender no feelings of long-term involvement in the job
• a feeling of disposibility: Management can only think of its workers as interchangeable parts (since turnover is so high, nobody is indispensible)
  
• a sense that loyalty would be ludicrous: Who could be loyal to an organization that views its people as parts?

The insidious effect here is that turnover engenders turnover. People leave quickly, so there's no spending money on training. Since the company has invested nothing in the individual, the individual thinks nothing of moving on.

The best organizations are striving to be the best. This is the common goal that provides common direction, joint satisfaction, and a strong binding effect. There is a mentality of permanance about such places, the sense that you'd be dumb to look for a job elsewhere- people would look at you as though you were daft(?). A common feature of companies with the lowest turnover is widespread retraining. No job is (should be) a dead end.

The Self-healing system

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 the business policy governing the new system has a sufficient degree of natural ad hoc-racy, its a mistake to automate it. Determinism will be no asset then; the system will be in constant maintenance.

Thinking about workflow here, we have to be able to automate the processes in such a way that it complements the human effort not replace it. The automation of only those human tasks which normally form one single unit has to be done, so that we still preserve the self healing capacity in case of failures by allowing the system to side step and the human intelligence to take over.

The reason that non-deterministic systems can often heal themselves painlessly and elegantly is that the humans who make up the system have an easy familarity with the underlying goals. Someday it may be possible to teach computers the goals of the system instead of the actions expected to achieve the goals (talking of predicate rules and business rule engine?).

THE WHOLE IS GREATER THAN PARTS

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

TEAMICIDE - Ways to kill a team. Most organizations dont set out conciously to kill teams. They just act that way.

• Defensive management
  
  You cant protect yourself against your own people's incompetence. Once you have decided your group, your best tactic is to trust them. People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.
• Bureaucracy
• Physical separation
• Fragmentation of time
• Quality reduction of the product
• Phony deadlines
• Clique control

Open Kimono - A person you cant trust with any autonomy is of no use to you. The team has something meaningful to form around when it is trusted. They're are not just getting the job done. They're making sure that the trust that's been placed in them is rewarded.

Skunkworks - People at all levels know whether some sensible insubordination is acceptable or not. People look out for their open kimono managers. They're determined to make them look good, even though the managers may botch an occasional decision.

Employment audition - The project members who listen to the audition are not just an audience; they have a say in whether the person gets the offer. In addition to technical judgement, they're supplying a team perspective on how well the candidate will fit in.

An insecure need for obedience is the opposite of natural authority (the one that exists between a master and an apprentice)

Chemistry for team formation:

• Make a cult of Quality - The best quality prevails and the team gets joint satisfaction out of providing perfect quality work
• "I told her I love her when I married her" - reassurance comes from what psychologists call closure. Divide the work into pieces and make sure that each piece has some substantive demostration of its own completion.
• The Elite team - People need a sense of uniqueness to be at peace with themselves.
• Dont break up the Yankees (the jelled team)
• A Network model of Team behavior - Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. 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.
• Selections from a chinese menu - A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team. The saddest example of the overly homogenous work group is the all-male team :( Whatever the heterogenous element is, it takes on symbolic importance to team members. It is a clear signal that its okay not to be a clone, okay not to fit into the corporate mold of uniform plastic person.

When teams happen, the work is fun, people are energized and they like themselves. Deadline and milestones are rolled over and they look for more. They feel loyal to the team and to the environment that allows the team to exist.

ITS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN TO WORK HERE

Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder -

• Pilot projects
• War games
• Brainstroming - As a facilitator introduce
• anology thinking ( how would nature do it)
• inversion ( how can we achieve the opposite)
• immersion (what will I do in this case)
• Provocative training experiences
• Trips, conferences, celebrations and retreats

Good sense and order are desirable components of our workday. There's also a place for adventure, silliness, and small amounts of constructive disorder.

HOLGAR DANSK - The sleeping gaint

When something is terribly out of kilter, it takes very little to raise people's consciousness of it. The gaint here is the actual working people whose patience is nearly exhausted, people who can know Silly when they see it.