Quotes from Tom DeMarco

people aren't inclined to work on tasks in the wrong order, since they derive satisfaction from accomplishment, and a motivation toward meaningful accomplishment tends to steer them onto the critical path. A little pressure might decrease wasted time slightly and cause an equally slight improvement in focusing on the critical path.

The trade-off between price and quality does not exist in Japan. Rather, the idea that high quality brings on cost reduction is widely accepted.1

Worker density (say, workers per thousand square feet) is inversely proportional to dedicated space per person.

The best managers use pressure only rarely and never over extended periods.

Believers insist that dysfunction is not an intrinsic flaw of MBO, but a simple matter of poor implementation. When dysfunction occurs, they (our era's new commissars) refine and redefine the objectives and try again. After five decades of experience with MBO, its believers are still refining and redefining and still waiting for results. I'm ready to call MBO's constant failure intrinsic.

Years of experience: People who had ten years of experience did not outperform those with two years of experience. There was no correlation between experience and performance except that those with less than six months' experience with the language used in the exercise did not do as well as the rest of the sample.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self.

Leadership is the ability to enroll other people in your agenda. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.

And the management team is not really a team. A team is a group of people who have joint responsibility for—and joint ownership of—one or more work products. People who own nothing in common may be called a team, but they aren't. This is not to say that companies never form real management teams, only that they do so rarely. Most of what are called management teams are a mockery of the team concept.

Significant organizational learning can't happen in isolation. It always involves the joint participation of a set of middle managers. This requires that they actually talk to each other and listen to each other, rather than just taking turns talking to and listening to a common boss.

The opposite approach would be to encourage people to make some errors. You do this by asking your folks on occasion what dead-end roads they've been down

The meeting wasn't really necessary to convey status; there are many less wasteful ways to do that. The need that was being served was not the boss's need for information, but for reassurance.

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.

Fostering an atmosphere that doesn't allow for error simply makes people defensive.

More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that it's okay sometimes not to answer their phones, and they must learn that their time–not just the quantity but its quality–is important.

It's not uncommon to see real teams as a phenomenon of only the bottom level of the hierarchy.

Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity.

Appearance is stressed far too much in workplace design. What is more relevant is whether the workplace lets you work or inhibits you.

What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity.

There is probably no job on earth for which an ability to believe six impossible things before breakfast is more of a requirement than software project management.

Fisher's fundamental theorem: "The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change." Fisher's example was the giraffe. It is highly adapted to food found up among the tree branches, but so unadaptable to a new situation that it can not even pick up a peanut from the ground at the zoo. The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated.

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 missed schedule indicts the planners, not the workers. Even if the workers are utterly incompetent, a plan that takes careful note of their inadequacies can help to minimize the damage. A plan that takes no account of realities is not just useless but dangerous.

their main role is that of a catalyst, not a director. They make it possible for the magic to happen.