Latha Karri

EECS 811

April 28th, 2009

 Introduction
 The Atlantic Systems Guild Inc.
 Members are authors, consultants and lecturers
 Principal members contribute to IEEE, Cutter IT Journal and
the Journal of Object Oriented Programming

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 Timothy Lister
 Holds an A.B. from Brown University
 Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE
 Fellow of the Cutter Business Technology
Council
 Frequent keynoter at Cutter Summits
 Wrote books: Peopleware, Waltzing with
Bears, Adrenaline Junkies and Template
Zombies
 Along with Tom DeMarco wrote: “Performance
in Organizations,” and “Litigation of Software-
Intensive Projects”

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 Tom DeMarco

 B.S.E.E. degree from Cornell University, an M.S.

from Columbia University and a diploma from the
University of Paris at the Sorbonne
 Consulted throughout America, Europe, Africa,
Australia and the far East
 Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the IEEE
 Recipient of the Warnier Prize for “lifetime
contribution to the field of computing” in 1986 and
recipient of the Stevens Award for “contribution to
the methods of software development” in 1999

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 Tom DeMarco [continued]

 Wrote books: Structured Analysis and System

Specification, Controlling Software Projects,
Peopleware, The Deadline, Slack, Getting Past
Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency,
Waltzing with Bears, and Adrenaline Junkies and
Template Zombies
 Wrote various articles: “Requirements Engineering,”
“On Death March Projects,” “Systems Architecture,”
“Professionalism in Software Engineering,”
“Certification of Software Engineers”

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 Introduction
 Book consists of six parts:
 “Managing the human resource”
 “The office environment”
 “The right people”
 “Growing productive teams”
 “It is supposed to be fun to work here”
 “Son of peopleware”

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Managing People – Survey Results
 Survey results from 500 projects:
 15% of the projects were cancelled, postponed or delivered
something that was never used
 25% of the projects failed to complete
 No technological issue was found to explain the failure
 The reason for the failure:
 Politics
 The term “Politics” is often loosely used to mean people
related problems or social problems

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 Managing People
 Both Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister say that:
 The major problems of our work are not so much
technological as sociological in nature
 Why do managers manage as though technology
were their principal concern?
 Because it is easy
 Other reasons:
 Little management experience
 Schooled in how the job is done rather than how to manage
the job

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 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quota for errors:
 Making occasional mistakes is natural and healthy
 People get defensive when they are not allowed to
make mistakes
 Creativity will not sustain when there is no room for
mistakes
 The Bozo definition of the management:
 “Management is a kicking ass”
 Kicking can make people active but not creative,
thoughtful and inventive
 Most importantly, it gives short term benefits but
not long term

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Managing Thinking Workers [continued]
 The people store \ uniqueness:
 Managers are most of the time threatened by
uniqueness
 Uniqueness is vital and effective to project
chemistry
 Uniqueness needs to be cultivated
 A project in a steady state is dead:
 Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two
people
 People’s values are often assessed based on the
steady state characteristics

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Managing Thinking Workers [continued]
 No time to think about this job, only to do it:
 Single mindedly oriented towards doing something
 Often, time pressure is used as an excuse for lack of think
time

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 Spanish Theory Management
 There is a fixed amount of value in the earth and the
path to accumulation of the wealth was to learn to
extract it more efficiently from the soil or from
people's backs
 This theory is alive whenever managers talk about
productivity
 Productivity is about extracting more in an hour of pay
 Managers often bully and cajole their people into working
long hours
 Managers trick people into accepting unrealistic deadlines

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There Ain’t No Such Thing As Overtime
 Overtime is valuable only for the last mile
 Undertime is not visible just like unpaid overtime

Slow down you crazy child,

And take the phone off the hook and disappear for a while.
It’s all right. You can afford to lose a day or two.
When will you realize……Vienna waits for you?

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 Management’s Misconceptions
 Add staff to a late project:
 Management fail to realize that adding staff to a late project
makes it later
 Fear that work expands to fill the available time
 Set phony deadlines
 Put people under time pressure:
 Management fail to realize that people under time pressure
don’t work better; they just work faster

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 Time Pressure
 Pressure beyond a certain level decreases performance

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 Time Pressure Consequences
 Time pressure leads to:
 Decreased quality products
 Decreased brainstorming
 Decreased time spent on investigation and research
 Decreased performance levels
 Increased stress levels

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 Quality – If Time Permits
 Quality is often tied to self-esteem
 Quality standards are both external and internal
 Managers think of quality as another attribute that can be
supplied in varying degrees
 The notion that “quality – if time permits” assures no
quality at all will sneak into the product

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 Flight From Excellence
 Some markets don’t give a damn about high quality
 This is true to a certain extent
 Industry has accustomed its clients to defect prone software
 Client's perceived quality needs are not often as great as the builder's

 Flight from excellence

 Allowing the standard of quality to be set by the buyer, rather
than the builder
 In the long run, market-based quality costs more

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 Flight From Excellence [continued]
 Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a
means to higher productivity
 Consider the following words of Tajima and Matsubara, two of
the most respected commentators on the Japanese
phenomenon:

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

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 Quality
 Interview with President Ray Tanguay - Toyota
Motor Manufacturing, Canada.
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTQtoeP_1oU&featur
e=related

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 Management’s True Role
 What is management’s true role?
 A manager’s function is not to make people work, but to
make it possible for people to work

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Open Office Environment
 “You never get anything done
around here between 9 and 5”
 Proof by repeated assertion :
 “Open-Plan DP Environment Boosts
Employee Productivity”

The fundamental areas of consideration in

designing an open-plan office within an
information processing environment are: the
system’s electrical distribution capabilities,
computer support capabilities and
manufacturer and dealer service

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 Open Office Environment [continued]
 A policy of total default:
 Failure to address the issue by saying that the solution is
beyond human capability
 IBM Survey results for Ideal office configuration:
 100 sq.ft. of dedicated space per worker
 30 sq.ft. of work surface per worker
 Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six foot
high partitions

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 Productivity Factors

 Productivity factors were observed by conducting

coding war game with 600 developers from 92
companies
 Top performers were about 10 times faster the worst
performers
 Top performers were about 2.5 times faster than median
performers
 Best organizations worked 11.1 times faster than the worst
organization

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 Productivity Factors [continued]

 Productivity non-factors:
 Language, years of experience, and salary
 Productivity factors:
 Work space, noise, privacy and interruptions

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 Productivity Factors [continued]

 Coding war game performance results:

Environment of the Best and Worst Performers
In the Coding War Games
Those Who Those Who
Performed in Performed in
Environmental Factors 1st Quartile 4th Quartile
1. How much dedicated work
space do you have? 78 sq.ft. 48 sq.ft.
2. Is it acceptably quiet? 57 % yes 29 % yes
3. Is it acceptably private? 62 % yes 19 % yes
4. Can you silence your phone? 52% yes 10 % yes
5. Can you divert your calls? 76 % yes 19 % yes
6. Do people often interrupt you
needlessly? 38 % yes 76 % yes
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 Brain Time Versus Body Time
 Typical developer work mode:
 Working alone: 30%
 Working with one other person: 50%
 Working with two or more people: 20%

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Brain Time Versus Body Time [continued]

 Flow:
 Takes around 15 minutes to enter
 Time passes without much notice
 Extremely productive
 Environment Factor = uninterrupted hours / body -
present hours

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 Workspace Patterns
 The first pattern: Tailored workspace from a kit
 The second pattern: Windows
 The third pattern: Indoor and outdoor space
 The fourth pattern: Public space

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 The Office Environment
 Google Zurich office environment:
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7290322.stm

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Parkinson’s Law
 The seven Sirens
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz 34
 Hire Right People
 Jim Collins: “Good to Great”
 Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off
the bus
 Good-to-great companies built a consistent system …
They hired self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be
managed, and then managed the system, not the people

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 Hiring Process
 While hiring:
 Portfolios
 Aptitude test
 Holding an auditorium
 Don’t let human resources organization
dominate

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Growing Productive Teams
 Typically teams don’t get work done, individuals
do
 Why do we need to form teams?

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 Objectives of Team Formation
 Team formation contributes towards:
 Goal alignment
 Diversity of skills, knowledge, abilities and experience
 Positive aspects of group dynamics
e.g. Increased creative flow

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 Team Formation Stages
 Forming: Team members define goals, roles,
and direction of the team
 Storming: Team sets rules and decision-
making processes, often renegotiates
(argues) over team roles and responsibilities
 Norming: Procedures, standards, and criteria
are agreed upon
 Performing: The team begins to function as a
system

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 Jelled Teams
 What is a jelled team?
 Group of people so closely knit that the whole is greater
than the sum of the parts

 Why do we want a jelled team?

 Once a team jells, the probability of success goes up
dramatically!

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 Signs of a Jelled Team
 Work is fun
 Self-motivated
 Low-turnover
 Sense of pride
 High morale
 Sense of eliteness
 Sense of identity
 Joint ownership of the product
 Loyalty to the team and the team
environment
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 Jelled Teams [continued]
 Jelled teams are like the neighboring states
helping each other
 Managers are usually not part of the teams

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 Teamicide
 Defensive management - not trusting the team
 Bureaucracy - too much paperwork
 Physical separation of team members
 Fragmentation of people’s time – assign multiple
projects
 Quality reduction of the product
 Phony deadlines
 Clique control - splitting up teams

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 Teamicide [continued]
 Most organizations don’t set out consciously to kill
teams … they just act that way

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 Chemistry Building Strategy
 Make a cult of quality
 Provide lots of satisfying closure
 Build a sense of eliteness
 Allow and encourage heterogeneity
 Preserve and protect the successful
teams
 Provide strategic but not tactical
direction

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Motivating People
 Salary
 Performance reviews
 Job rotation
 Training
 Miscellaneous ideas

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 Motivating People - Salary
 A 10% salary increase
 Stock options and other long-term benefits

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Motivating People - Performance Reviews
 Performance reviews are generally useful, if handled
objectively
 Performance reviews are often spaced too far apart
 New approach: “360” day reviews to assess employee’s
interactions with peers, customers, everyone around
him/her

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 Motivating People - Rotation
 Eliminates unique roles where one person is a sole
living expert
 Works fine if turnover rate is low

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 Motivating People - Training
 Offer training 1-2 days/year
 Best organizations offer 5-10 days/year
 Customize training to the real needs of the
job
 Suggestions:
 Accrue education days
 Give software professionals their own individual
“training budgets” at the beginning of each year,
and let them decide how, when, and where it will
be spent.

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 Motivating People – Creative Ways
 Pilot projects
 War games
 Brainstorming sessions
 Trips, conferences, and retreats
 Study groups: Weekly meetings of
60-90 minutes to discuss technology
issues
 Tuition reimbursement plans

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 Presentation Topics
 Managing People
 Managing Thinking Workers
 Quality – If Time Permits
 Office Environment
 Hiring Right People
 Growing Productive Teams
 Jelled Teams
 Teamicide
 Chemistry for Team Formation
 Motivating People
 Quiz
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 Quiz – True \ False
 Adding staff to a late project, only makes it later - true
 A jelled team is a group of people who are closely knit
that the whole is greater than sum of the parts - true
 One of the characteristic features of jelled teams is low
morale - false
 One of the goals for team formation is to achieve goal
alignment - true

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 Quiz – True \ False [continued]
 Forming, storming, norming and performing are the four
stages of team formation - true
 One of the best ways to motivate people is to provide
training sessions - true
 Defensive management is an example of teamicide - true
 People under time pressure don’t work better; they just
work faster - true

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 Conclusion
 Managing people
 Manager’s role should be to make it possible for people to work
 Quality if time permits
 Management should incorporate quality in every phase of delivery
 Office environment
 Management should ensure that the work environment is conducive
enough to focus while working
 Hiring right people
 Management should ensure that the right people are hired through
proper interview methods

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 Conclusion [continued]
 Growing productive teams
 Management should preserve and protect jelled teams
 Management should avoid teamicide
 Motivating people
 Management should take creative steps to keep people motivated
and a few things to consider are:
 Provide “360” day performance reviews
 Increase the pay scale and give promotions
 Encourage fun filled trips, retreats and conferences
 Provide training
 Provide job rotation

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 References
 http://www.techpresentations.com/2007/01/08/the-return-
of-peopleware/
 http://www.yourdon.com/downloads/Peopleware2008.pdf
 http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/905991
 http://www.mindtools.com/stress/UnderstandStress/Stres
sPerformance.htm
 http://www.stthomas.edu/ethicalleadership/pdfs/Getting
%20the%20Right%20Pe.pdf
 http://users.csc.calpoly.edu/~djanzen/courses/405W09/p
resentations/Peopleware.pdf

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 References [continued]
 http://www.systemsguild.com/GuildSite/TRL/Tim_Lister.h
tml
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNAJ5QnAV0Y
 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7290322.stm
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTQtoeP_1oU&featur
e=related

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