Quotes from Tom DeMarco

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change.

Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn't be doing.

quality is most of all a function of its usefulness. The Corporate Quality Program Real quality has little to do with defects

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.

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.

A policy of "Quality—If Time Permits" will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product. Hewlett-Packard

each switch imposes a direct penalty of a bit more than twenty minutes of lost concentration.

Plan for Success is a staple of management philosophy, particularly in our high-tech industries. It leads us to pour desired outcomes into concrete, and make commitments based on achieving those outcomes. Plan for Success is the intellectual equivalent of: Make big bucks by winning fifteen consecutive hands of blackjack without taking any money off the table till the end. It works when it works, but leaves you in the lurch when it doesn't (which is most of the time).

when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

Authoritarian management is obsessed with time. It is destructive of slack and inclined to goad people into outperforming their peers. And it makes learning impossible.

The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of the bottom quartile. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it. What

You can no more expect her to work without meaningful challenge than you could expect her to work without salary. The nearly equal status of challenge and pay is unique to knowledge workers. They are different from the blue-collar workers that our fathers managed a generation ago. The easy, dumb error of managing knowledge workers is to forget that they are different and assume that basic rules developed on factory floors a century ago apply to them.

But people never really "do as they're told." The difference between for-profit and volunteer organizations is that in the for-profit world people do get paid and so they are willing to give up some control to the boss, to accept at least some direction. But they don't give up all control. You couldn't pay them enough for that.

If you've got decent people under you, there is probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than to get yourself out of their hair occasionally.

When communication happens only over the hierarchy lines, that's a priori evidence that the managers are trying to hold on to all control. This is not only inefficient but an insult to the people underneath.

Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can't be changing. If you need to use a reactive strategy of contract labor, your team will probably never jell. In fact, the workforce you manage almost certainly won't be a team at all.

IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.)

Ability to change has to be an organic part of the organization. Change has to be going on all the time, everywhere. It needs to be everybody's business.

Meeting the deadline is not what this is all about. What this is about is looking like you're trying your damnedest to meet the deadline. In this age of "lean and mean," it is positively unsafe for you to run the project with a lean (optimal) staff.

That means that everybody needs to have some capacity to devote to change. This is time that people dedicate to rethinking how their piece of the whole works, and how it ought to work. Once the change is under way, more time is required to practice new ways and to master new skills. That's the cost. The benefit is vitality and a firm grip on the future. Slack is the way you invest in change. Slack represents operational capacity sacrificed in the interests of long-term health.

A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.

The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.

The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility. The overarmored organization has lost the ability to move and move quickly. When this happens, standard process is the cause of lost mobility. It is, however, not the root cause. The root cause is fear.