Quotes from Tom DeMarco

Does the overall effort have both a schedule and a goal, where the schedule and the goal are markedly different? If the schedule is the goal, there is no risk management at work. The earliest date by which the work could conceivably be done makes an excellent goal but an awful schedule.

The bald fact is that many companies provide developers with a workplace that is so crowded, noisy, and interruptive as to fill their days with frustration. That alone could explain reduced efficiency as well as a tendency for good people to migrate elsewhere.

People under time pressure don't work better - they just work faster.

Quality is free, but only for those are willing to pay heavily for it.

There are a million ways to loose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back.

The project workers are the ones most familiar with the territory of the project. If a given direction doesn't make sense to them, it doesn't make any sense at all.

Setting aside a risk reserve with a 50 percent or better confidence level is called risk containment. When risks are paid for out of this reserve, they are said to be contained.

Risk mitigation is the set of actions you will take to reduce the impact of a risk should it materialize. There are two not-immediately-obvious aspects to risk mitigation: The plan has to precede materialization. Some of the mitigation activities must also precede materialization.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis.

Growth is the rising tide that floats all boats. The period of growth is one in which people are naturally less change-resistant. It is therefore the optimal time to introduce any change. Specifically, changes that are not growth-related should be timed to occur during growth periods. This is not because they are strictly necessary then, but because they are more likely to be possible then. You need that advantage going up against Goliath.

When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic.

Yes, technology is moving swiftly, but (the High-Tech Illusion again) most of what you're doing is not truly high-tech work. While the machines have changed enormously, the business of software development has been rather static. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification, the low-tech part of our work. Productivity within the software industry has improved by 3 to 5 percent a year, only marginally better than the steel or automobile industry.

Each of these standards says, in effect, "I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work Ã¢â'¬Â¦ except the hard part.

The right way to think about domain knowledge is as a corporate capital asset, as dollars of investment in the head of each knowledge worker, put there by organizational investment in that employee. When that person leaves, the asset is gone. If you did a rigorous accounting of this human capital, you would be obliged to declare an extraordinary loss each time one of your people quit.

Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I'll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Viola, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention.

Process standardization from on high is disempowerment. It is a direct result of fearful management, allergic to failure.

Since they can't alter the rate of mental discriminations (basic elements of knowledge work) per second, their potential to respond to pressure is severely limited. All they can do is Eliminate wasted time Defer tasks that are not on the critical path Stay late

As defense against failure, standard process is a kind of armor. The more worried you are about failure, the heavier the armor you put on. But armor always has a side effect of reduced mobility.

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management.

Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives. The assumption is almost impossible to implement unless nearly everything is in steady state.

A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a portfolio of projects. Each project seeks to effect some change. In an older, simpler time, projects were a way to move from one status quo to another. The project was a disruption, but the new status quo, once established, could be expected to last for an extended period. Now there is no new status quo.

work performance is not an abstraction: You can't say that Ted is a high-performance worker in general, only that he has proved himself good at doing some one particular thing. Fragmentation

In a healthy knowledge-worker organization, people don't waste a lot of time anyway, since wasted time is an affront to them as much as it is to their management. They are more likely to be frustrated by wasted time than enjoy it.

Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning.