This book was recommended to me by David Price (thanks again David), and I may recommend further to everybody else.
It is funny and full of common sense. Of course I would not sign every single word (it is for instance pessimistic upon productivity improvement by technical means, which may support some exceptions in my opinion).
I join here my reading notes (a collection of references, quite extensive. Feel free to make up your mind yourself about which ones apply to us :-).
Regards!
Marc
[DeMarco] Peopleware - Productive Projects and Teams Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister Dorset House Publishing Co., New York (NY) 1987 p 20 [The builders] ... tend to impose quality standards of their own. The minimum that will satisfy them is more or less the best quality they have achieved in the past. p 22 Quality, far beyond that required by the end user, is a means to higher productivity. p 30: Lose Fat While Sleeping One day, in a moment of high silliness, I started clipping ads for products that claimed to boost performance by one percent or more. Within a very short time, I had quite a pile. The amazing thing was the diversity of the means advertised to yield big productivity gains. p 34 The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. p 38, in 'The Furniture Police' 'Look at how beautifully uniform everything is!' p 45 Three rules of thumb seem to apply whenever you measure variations in performance over a sample of individuals: - Count on the best people outperforming the worst by about 10:1. - Count on the best performer being about 2.5 times better than the median performer. - Count on the half that are better-than-median performers outdoing the other half by more than 2:1. p 57 Saving money on space may be costing you a fortune. p 59 'Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all.' Gilb's Law doesn't promise you that measurement will be free or even cheap, and it may not be perfect - just better than nothing. (Personal comment: In any situation, there exist a way to perform measurement that is better than nothing. Not every measurement is.) p 63: Flow Flow is a condition of deep meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sense of euphoria, and one is largely unaware of the passage of time. p 82 Imagine that your organization is about to build a complex of new space. What is the first step in this process? Almost certainly, it is development of a master plan. [...] The result is sterile uniformity and space that doesn't work for anyone except the one Ego to whom it stands as a tribute. p 83 (Reference to [Alexander: The Timeless Way of Building]) In place of the master plan, Alexander proposes a meta-plan. It is a philosophy by which a facility can grow in an evolutionary fashion to achieve the needs of its occupants. The meta-plan has three parts: - a philosophy of piecemeal growth - set of patterns or shared design principles governing growth - local control of design by those who will occupy the space. (Personal note: This is object-orientation!) p 83 (From [Alexander]) This natural or organic order emerges when there is perfect balance between the need of the individual parts of the environment, and the needs of the whole. p 97 The need for uniformity is a sign of insecurity on the part of management. Strong managers don't care when team members cut their hair or whether they wear ties. Their pride is tied only to their staff's accomplishments. p 103 The hiring process needs to focus on at least some sociological and human communication traits. The best way we've discovered to do this is through the use of auditions for job candidates. Goals: - see the candidates' communications skills - give the future coworkers a part in the hiring process. p 111 People tend to stay at such companies [the best organizations] because there is a widespread sense that you are expected to stay. p 115 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 sense at all. p 115 Big M Methodology is an attempt to centralize thinking. [...] The idea is simple[r] and crude[r]: the idea that project people aren't smart enough to do the thinking. p 116 Voluminous documentation is part of the problem, no part of the solution. p 117 Nothing could be more demotivating than the knowledge that management thinks its workers incompetent. p 118 Methodologies seek to force convergence through statute. [...] Better ways to achieve convergence are: - Training [...] - Tools [...] - Peer Review [...] (quality circles, walkthroughs, inspections, technology fairs). p 119 This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect. Loosely stated, it says that people perform better when they're trying something new. p 120 The total of all standards imposed upon your people should be described in no more than ten pages. p 121 The challenge of the work is important, but not in and of itself; it is important because it gives us something to focus on together. Chapter 19, p 129-131 The Black Team (Story of a successful team) p 133 "Teamicide" policies: - defensive management - bureaucracy - physical separation - fragmentation of people's time - quality reduction of the product - phony deadlines - clique control Defensive Management, p 133-134 [...] once you have decided to go with a given group, your best tactic is to trust them. p 135 The right to be right is [...] irrelevant; it's only the right to be wrong that makes you free. p 144 This Open Kimono attitude is the exact opposite of defensive management. You take no step to defend yourself from the people you've put in positions of trust. p 145 If you've got the wrong counsel, you're in deep bananas anyway. p 147 There are rules and we do break them. p 153 The group's adherence to to a corporate standard of uniformity is almost a symbol of the manager's degree of control. [...] The more comforting it is to the manager, the more it saps the lifeblood of the team. p 155 [...] managers are usually not part of the teams they manage. Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. [...] The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy. For all the deference paid to the concept of *leadership* (a cult word in our industry), it just doesn't have much place here. Chaos and Order, p 159 The people down below get to have the real fun of putting things shipshape. p 160 ...a policy of constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder: - pilot projects - war games - brainstorming - provocative training expenses - training, trips, conferences, celebrations and retreats p 161 What present-day standardization has achieved is a *documentary consistency* among products, but nothing approaching meaningful *functional consistency*. In other words, standardization has mainly homogenized the paperwork associated with the products, rather than the products themselves. p 168 (in "the cottage industry phenomenon") They want to work when they want to work [...] They've got more freedom, more time off, more choice of work. They're having more fun. They often make more money. p 172 "There's something you don't understand my friend. I don't wrestle the bull." Waking up Holgar, p 173 It doesn't take much to wake up the giant. If the silliness is gross enough. people need no more than a gentle catalyst. It may be one small voice saying, "This is unacceptable." People know it's true.