Quotes from Tom DeMarco

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you're risk-averse, you won't do it. And that's a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure.

In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

Think about cuisine: Most probably, your great-grandparents never encountered a market offering Chinese dumplings, Bombay lime pickle, lemongrass curry, tiramisu, and gnocci, but these foods are now an integral part of the modern world.

What I call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy.

The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work.

Risk management is the explicit quantitative declaration of uncertainty. But in some corporate cultures, people aren't allowed to be uncertain. They're allowed to be wrong, but they can't be uncertain. They are obliged to look their bosses and clients in the face and lie rather than show uncertainty about outcomes. Uncertainty is for wimps.

Management is hard, and not because there is so much work to do (an overworked manager is almost certainly doing work he/she shouldn't be doing). Management is hard because the skills are inherently difficult to master. Your mastery of them will affect your organization more than anything going on under you.

THERE'S LEADERSHIP, and then there's "leadership." The first conveys vision, engenders confidence, and encourages striving toward common goals. The other doesn't.

Risks and benefits always go hand in hand. The reason that a project is full of risk is that it leads you into uncharted waters. It stretches your capability, which means that if you pull it off successfully, it's going to drive your competition batty. The ultimate coup is to stretch your own capability to a point beyond the competition's ability to respond. This is what gives you competitive advantage and helps you build a distinct brand in the market.

Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone.

When managers are overworked, they're doing something other than management; the more they allow themselves to be overworked, the less real management gets done.

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.

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.

Vision is the sine qua non of constructive change.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.