# Peopleware Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams Tom Demarco, 3rd ed., 2013. Tom Demarco, 2nd ed., 1999. # Part I: Managing the Human Resource Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency to manage people as though they were modular components. Consider the preparation we had for the task of management: We were judged to be good management material because we performed well as doers, as technicians and developers which often involved organizing our resources into modular pieces such as software routines, circuits, or other units of work. The modules we constructed were made to exhibit a black-box characteristic, so that their internal idiosyncrasies could be safely ignored. They were designed to be used with a standard interface. After years of reliance on these modular methods, we try to manage our human resources the same way. Unfortunately, it does not work very well. In Part I, we begin to investigate a very different way of thinking about and managing people that involves specific accommodation to the very non-modular character of the human resource. ## 1 Somewhere Today, a Project Is Failing Out of 500+ project histories, 25% of projects that lasted 25 work-years or more failed to complete. > The High-Tech Illusion! The major problems of our work are not so much technological as _sociological_ in nature. But managers manage as though technology were their principal concern. They are forever on the lookout for a technical whiz-bang that promises to automate away part of their work. The most strongly people-oriented aspects of their responsibility are often given the lowest priority. ## 2 Make a Cheeseburger, Sell a Cheeseburger Development is inherently different from production. > Encourage people to make some errors. The view that managers provide all the thinking and the people underneath them just carry out their bidding. There is nothing more discouraging to any worker than the sense that his own motivation is inadequate and has to be "supplemented" by that of the boss [or contractor]. > Managers go to great lengths to convince themselves that noone is irreplacible. > Uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective. It is something to be cultivated. ## 3 Vienna Waits for You Spanish vs English Management Theory _Productivity_ should mean achieving more in an hour of pay, but all too often it has come to mean extracting more for an hour of pay (unpaid overtime). > Overtime for salaried workers is a figment of the naive manager's imagination. Noone can consistently work more than forty hours with the level of intensity required for creative work. You need to take turnover into account when you decide to attain higher productivity. Most organizations cannot tell you what replacement of an experienced worker costs. Productivity has to be defined as benefit / cost. > People under time pressure do not work better; they just work faster. To work faster, they have to sacrifice the quaility of the product and their own job satisfaction. ## 4 Quality—If Time Permits We all tend to tie our self-esteem strongly to the _quality_ of the product we produce -- not the quantity. Managers jeopardize product quality by setting **unreachable deadlines**. To pressure people into delivering a product that does not measure up to their own quality standards is a mistake. > Quality (far beyond that required by the end user) is a means to higher productivity. ## 5 Parkinson’s Law Revisited **Parkinson's Law:** Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. Bureaucracies give little job satisfaction to their workers. > Projects for which there were no estimates had the highest productivity of all. **Corollary to Parkinson's Law:** Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day. ## 6 Laetrile ### The Seven Sirens The false hopes engendered by easy technological non-solutions are like the Sirens that tempted poor Odysseus. Each siren reaches out to you with her own beguiling message, an attractive fallacy that leads nowhere. As long as you believe them, you are going to be reluctant to do the hard work necessary to build a healthy corporate culture. ### 7 False Hopes of Software Development 1. There is some new trick you have missed that could send productivity soaring. 2. Other managers are getting gains of 100% or more. The typical magical tool that is touted to you is focused on the coding and testing part of the life cycle. But even if coding and testing went away entirely, you could not expect a gain of 100%. There is still all the analysis, negotiation, specification, training, acceptance testing, conversion, and cut-over to be done. 3. Technology is moving so swiftly that you are being passed by. Most of what you do is not high-tech work. We still spend most of our time working on requirements and specification which are the low-tech part of our work. 4. Changing languages (such as Java) will give you huge gains. Programming languages only impact the implementation part of the project. This might give you a 5% gain but no more. 5. Because of the backlog, you need to double productivity immediately. The much talked about _software backlog_ is a myth. We all know that projects cost a lot more at the end than what we expected them to cost at the beginning. The typical project that is stuck in the mythical backlog is there because it has barely enough benefit to justify building it. 6. You automate everything else; isn't it about time you automated away your software development staff? This is another variation of the high-tech illusion: the belief that software developers do easily automatable work. Their principal work is human communication to organize the users' expressions of needs into formal procedure. That work will be necessary no matter how we change the life cycle. 7. Your people will work better if you put them under a lot of pressure -- no, they will just enjoy it less. > Key idea: The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work. ---------- # Part II: The Office Environment To make it possible for people to work, you have to come to grips with the factors that sometimes make it impossible. The causes of lost hours and days are numerous but not so different from one another. They are often failures of the environment that the organization has provided to help you work. The phone rings off the hook, the printer service man stops by to chat, the copier breaks down, the chap from the blood drive calls to revise donation times, Personnel continues to scream for the updated skills survey forms, time sheets are due at 3 P M., lots more phone calls come in, . . . and the day is gone. Some days you never spend a productive minute on anything having to do with getting actual work done. Everybody’s workday is plagued with frustration and interruption. Entire days are lost, and nobody can put a finger on just where they went. If you wonder why almost everything is behind schedule, consider this: > There are a million ways to lose a workday, but not even a single way to get one back. In Part II, we look into some of the causes of lost time and propose measures that you can take to create a healthy, work-conducive environment. ## 7 The Furniture Police Provide some areas where a conversation can take place without disturbing others (NOT a cubicle). Bad Examples: 1. New office space has a cubicle as a meeting area. 2. Managers who leave their doors open during meetings. 3. Dilbert is popular because it pokes fun at the cubicle. 4. Would you have been able to study in a cubicle? 5. The PA system. 6. How much do you save in office furniture? How much do you lose in productivity? Office space should be considered an investment rather than an expense. The cost of workspace for one developer is a small percentage of the salary paid to the developer. You will save a small amount on workspace, but it will cost you much more in lost productivity. 7. I get the most/best work done after 5pm when everyone has gone for the day. People work better in natural light. ## 8 You Never Get Anything Done around Here between 9 and 5 Coding War Games: Productivity Factors ### 3 rules of thumb 1. The best people outperformed the worst by about 10:1 There is also a 10:1 difference in productivity among software organizations. Something about their environment and corporate culture is failing to attract and keep good people or is making it impossible for even good people to work effectively. 2. The best people were about 2.5 times better than the median performer. 3. The half that are better-than-median performers out-performed the other half by more than 2:1. The following factors have little or no affect on performance: - Language - Years of experience - Number of defects: the zero-defect workers performed better on average. - Salary ## 9 Saving Money on Space The total investment in the worker could easily be 20 times the cost of his or her workplace (20:1). Workers who reported that their workplace was acceptably quiet were 1/3 more likely to deliver zero-defect work. ## Intermezzo: Productivity Measurement and Unidentified Flying Objects Gilb’s Law But You Can’t Afford Not to Know Measuring with Your Eyes Closed ## 10 Brain Time versus Body Time > Myth: Work accomplished is proportional to the number of paid hours worked. ## 11 The Telephone When you begin to collect data about the quality of work time, your attention is automatically focused on one of the principal causes of interruption, the incoming telephone call. ### A Modified Telephone Ethic Enough is enough. The path toward sanity in working conditions is a new attitude toward interruptions and toward the telephone. People who are charged with getting work done must have some peace and quiet to do it in which means periods of total freedom from interruptions. When they want to work in flow, they have to have some efficient, acceptable way of ignoring incoming calls. There are workable schemes to help people free themselves from phones and other interruptions when they find it necessary. ### Incompatible Multitasking When you ate doing think-intensive work like design, interruptions are productivity killers. To the extent that knowledge workers are required to multitask, their managers need to take account of the flow requirements of the different tasks. Mixing flow and highly interruptive activities is a recipe for nothing but frustration. More important than any gimmick you introduce is a change in attitude. People must learn that it is okay sometimes not to answer their phones, and their managers need to understand that as well. The character of knowledge workers’ work: The quality of their time is important, not just its quantity. ## 12 Bring Back The Door There are some prevalent symbols of success and failure in creating a sensible workplace. The most obvious symbol of success is the door. When there are sufficient doors, workers can control noise and interruptibility to suit their changing needs. ## 13 Taking Umbrella Steps For this final chapter on the office environment, we look into characteristics of an ideal workplace, trying to shed some light on concerns such as these: - What kind of space would support your workers best to make them comfortable, happy, and productive? - What form of work space would make these workers feel best about themselves and about their work? > Windows! ---------- # Part III: The Right People The final outcome of any effort is more a function of who does the work than of how the work is done. But modern management science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right people. Management science is much more concerned with the boss’s role as principal strategist and tactician of the work. We are taught to think of management as playing out one of those battle simulation board games. In the next four chapters, we will attempt to undo the damage of the manager-as-strategist view, and replace it with an approach that encourages you to court success with this formula: ### Formula for success 1. Get the right people. 2. Make them happy so they do not want to leave. 3. Turn them loose. Of course, you have to coordinate the efforts of even the best team so that all the individual contributions add up to an integrated whole. For most efforts, success or failure is in the cards from the moment the team is formed and the initial directions set out. With talented people, the manager can almost coast from that point on. ## 14 The Hornblower Factor Corporate culture is unhealthy: 1. Pressure to hire/promote workers who look, act, and think like everyone else (do what they are told -- a perfect drone; "Borg"). 2. Sign of insecurity on the part of management. 3. Why do almost all managers wear suits? > The most successful manager is the one who shakes up the local entropy to bring in the right people and let them be themselves, even though they may deviate from the corporate norm. ## 15 Let’s Talk about Leadership Leadership as a Work-Extraction Mechanism One of those dreadful motivational posters tells us: The speed of the leader sets the rate of the pack. This kind of leadership is a work-extraction mechanism whose purpose is to enhance not the _quality_ of the experience but the _quantity_. The reason you are being led is to get you to work harder, stay longer, and stop goofing off. ## 16 Hiring a Juggler It would be ludicrous to think of hiring a juggler without first seeing him perform. Yet when you set out to hire an engineer or a designer or a programmer or a group manager, you don’t ask to see a design or a program or anything. In fact, the interview is just talk. > There seems to be an unwritten rule that says it is okay to ask the candidate about past work but not to ask to see it. ### Aptitude Tests (Erghhhh) Our industry has had a long, irregular flirtation with the idea of aptitude testing. In the sixties, the idea was positively in vogue. The tests measure the wrong thing. ### Holding an Audition The idea is simple. You ask a candidate to prepare a ten- or fifteen-minute presentation on some aspect of past work. ## 17 Playing Well with Others Team jell takes time, and during much of that time, the composition of the team cannot 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 will not be a team at all. ## 18 Childhood’s End ### Continuous Partial Attention In the most-simplistic terms, the new generational divide in your organization is about attention: Young people divide theirs while their older colleagues tend to focus on one or possibly two tasks at a time. A generation that grew up studying with music blaring on their iPods is an illustration of _continuous partial attention_. The problem is that continuous partial attention is the exact opposite of flow. A _flow_ state is essential for getting real work done which means you need to set limits on how attention may be divided. You need to make your youngest workers understand the difference between spending 2 percent of their workday on Facebook in a single block of time and spending 2 percent of their attention all day on Facebook. ### Articulate the contract Articulating the contract to young workers is going to be essential to give them a chance to fit in. If work needs to be done in flow, your people need to be ready to focus. Continuous-partial-attention periods have to be defined as personal time off, acceptable within limits during the workday. The rest of the workday is for work. Continuous partial attention at meetings is similarly destructive of whatever the legitimate purposes may be of the meeting. Even your older workers may be prone to doing email and other tasks during meetings. Think of imperfect attention at meetings to be more about a dysfunctional meeting culture than about anyone’s work ethic. ## 19 Happy to Be Here ### Questions - What annual employee turnover has your organization experienced over the last few years? - How much does it cost on average to replace a person who leaves? - How much does it cost on average to hire a contractor? ### Short-term Perspective - Optimize for the short term, exploit people (such as contractors), cheat on the workplace, and do nothing to conserve its very lifeblood, the peopleware that is its only real asset. - Agricultural analogy: We would eat our seed corn immediately and all starve next year. > In companies with low turnover, the hierarchy is low and flat. It is always cheaper in the short run to fire the person who needs retraining and hire someone else (such as a contractor) who already has the required skills. The best organizations do not do this. ## 20 Human Capital - expense/investment/capitalize - bottom-line = shortsighted; fails to preserve long-term investment > Companies that downsize are admitting that their upper management has blown it. ---------- # Part IV: Growing Productive Teams Think about enjoyable work experiences from your career. What was it that made the experience such a pleasure? The simplistic answer is, “Challenge.” > Good work experiences have always got a fair measure of challenge about them. What is in the foreground of most of our prized work memories is _team interaction_. When a group of people fuse into a meaningful whole, the entire character of the work changes. 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. The challenge is the instrument for our coming together. In the best work groups, the ones in which people have the most fun and perform at their upper limits, team interactions are everything. > People work better and have more fun when the team comes together. Part IV looks into the concept of the successfully bonded team and things you can do to help such teams happen. ## 21 The Whole Is Greater Than the Sum of the Parts > team + jell = momentum Professional workers are supposed to accept their employer's goals as a condition of employment. Believing that workers will automatically accept organizational goals is the sign of naïve management. Throughout the upper ranks of the organization, there is marvelous ingenuity to be sure that each manager has a strong personal incentive to accept the corporate goals. At the bottom (where the real work is performed) this ingenuity fails. Managers do not take particular care to foster jelled teams. - Part of the reason is an imperfect understanding of why teams matter. - The insecure manager is threatened by them. > The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. ### Signs of a Jelled Team The most important characteristic is low turnover during projects and in the middle of well-defined tasks. - strong sense of identity. - sense of eliteness (uniqueness) on a good team. - joint ownership of the product - people enjoy their work ## 22 The Black Team The value of jelled teams will be obvious to you if you have already had the enjoyable experience of working on one. Finding the last bug was hard, but some testers were better than others. The company formed a group of these particularly talented testers and gave them the charter to do final testing on critical software before it was sent to the customers. Thus was born the legendary Black Team. ## 23 Teamicide When you are stuck trying to solve a problem, deBono suggests that rather than looking for ways to achieve your goal, look for ways to achieve the exact opposite of your goal. ### Teamicide - defensive management - bureaucracy - physical separation - time fragmentation - reduced product quality - phony deadlines - clique control ### Defensive Management - Only his own judgement was competent; anyone else's was suspect - Prescriptive Methodologies - Technical interference by the manager Solution: - Let them make some mistakes - Override a decision rarely ### Bureaucracy Paperwork accounts for more than 30% of the cost of producing a product. > paperwork = pure bureaucracy = mindless paper pushing **Physical Separation:** When they are all on the same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time. **Fragmentation of Time:** Bad for teams, bad for efficiency. **Quality-Reduced Product:** The steps we take to deliver a product in less time result in lower quality. **Clique Control:** The team phenomenon is something that occurs only at the bottom of the hierarchy. ## 24 Teamicide Revisited - motivational accessories: managment believes these virtues can be improved with posters rather than hard work and managerial talent. - extended overtime reduces productivity ## 25 Competition - competition inhibits team jell - peer-coaching - sports team as a metaphor is a bad idea. - Team: the success of the individual is tied to the success of the whole. Managerial actions that have teamicidal side effects: - annual salary or merit reviews - management by objectives - recognizing individual accomplishment - performance awards - performance measurements ## 26 A Spaghetti Dinner Team Effects Beginning to Happen What’s Been Going On Here? ## 27 Open Kimono > Open Kimono: trust the people under you and don't second-guess. Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners! ## 28 Chemistry for Team Formation chemistry = good managers devote their time to building and maintaining healthy chemistry. The judgement that a still imperfect product is "close enough" is the death knell for a jelling team. closure = successful completion of work assigned. Divide the work into _milestones_ and make sure that each piece has a substantial demonstration of completion. If you could effect some change in the people you manage and make them more productive and goal-oriented but also less controllable, would you do it? > If a team knits, don't break it up! Teams are made up of peers, equals that function as equals. > There is no hierarchy in team! On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. - The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy! - A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team. ---------- # Part V: Fertile Soil Projects and teams exist within a context provided by the larger organization which we call the _corporate culture_. Some cultures support healthy work, while others may make it almost impossible. While factors at the organizational level might be beyond your ability to control, they are still worth considering. At worst, you need to be aware of what’s being imposed upon you from above; At best, you may someday be in a position to revamp it to best facilitate the work going on in projects underneath you. ## 29 The Self-Healing System ### Over-automation Deterministic and Nondeterministic Systems When you automate a previously all-human system, it becomes entirely deterministic. The new system is capable of making only those responses planned explicitly by its builders. Automators spend much of their time thinking through situations that are so unlikely or occur so rarely that the human elements of the old system never even bothered to consider them unless and until they actually happened. If the business policy governing the new system has a sufficient degree of natural adhoc-cracy, it is a mistake to automate it. ### Methodology A _Methodology_ is a general systems theory of how a whole class of thought-intensive work ought to be conducted. - A "fat book". - An attempt to centralize thinking. - People are not smart enough to do the thinking. - Can do grievous damage to efforts in which the people are fully competent. - Tries to force the work into a fixed mold that guarantees: 1. Paperwork 2. Methods 3. No Responsibility - blame the Methodology 4. No Motivation - The view that knowledge is so valuable, we must use it sparingly. **Malicious Compliance:** People will do exactly what the Methodology says, even when they know doing so is a waste of time. - The obsession with Methodologies in the workplace is another instance of the "high-tech illusion". ### Convergence of Method Most of the benefits claimed on behalf of Methodologies are really benefits of _convergence of method_. To the extent that different people doing the same work converge on the same methods and use them the same way, there can be real advantages. Maintenance personnel will be able to relate more quickly to new products, developers will be able to move onto new projects and get up to speed more quickly, metrics will be consistently defined from one effort to another, and certain kinds of failures will be more readily detectable. - Convergence of method is a good thing. - Methodologies are not the only way to achieve convergence. Methodologies seek to force convergence through statute. There is an inevitable backlash, the result partly of enforcers’ heavy-handedness and partly of thinking workers’ strong sense of independence. - Better ways: 1. Training 2. Tools 3. Peer Review A _standard_ is defined as a proven method for undertaking a repeated task demonstrated widely and successfully within a company. Hunting out new approaches and imposing them as standards before anyone in the organization has even tried them out. **Hawthorne Effect:** People perform better when they are trying something new. The total of all standards imposed upon your people should be described in no more than ten pages. ## 30 Dancing with Risk > The One Risk We Almost Never Manage: the risk of our own failure. ## 31 Meetings, Monologues, and Conversations Some organizations are so addicted to meetings that work has to take second place. They hold meetings that have little purpose and no clearly defined end-state. At the other extreme, some organizations are so fearful of the waste of meetings that they refuse to use the “M” word at all. The middle is the only safe ground. ### Stand-Up Meetings A somewhat new wrinkle is the stand-up meeting, typically conducted in an empty space (no tables or chairs) with all participants on their feet. The theory is that no one gets too comfortable and so the tendency to prattle on is reduced. Even short stand-ups can be a drag on an organization’s effectiveness if they lack purpose and focus. So what should the purpose and focus of a meeting be? It depends on what kind of a meeting it is. ### Basic Meeting Hygiene A meeting that is specifically called to get something done might be called a _working meeting_. A working meeting is typically called to _reach a decision_. If you can say definitively what group action terminates the meeting, then it’s a working meeting. If you can’t, it isn’t. ### Ceremonies A meeting that is ended by the clock is a _ceremony_ whose purpose is not to get any particular thing decided. It’s all FYI. The FYIing often happens in a ritualistic manner: quick intro and announcements by a boss, followed by serial one-on-one interactions between the boss and each subordinate. At any given moment, two people are involved. The others are nominally listening with emphasis on the nominally. There is occasionally a real need for ceremony in the workplace. A ceremony might be called to celebrate some accomplishment, to lay out a strategic change of direction, or to evaluate a project at its end. All of these justifiable ceremonies are a bit out of the ordinary. That is what makes them justifiable. It is the regular ceremony that needs to be suspect. An example of a regular ceremony is the weekly (or daily!) status meeting, with ten or twenty people locked in a room taking turns talking to the boss. ## 32 The Ultimate Management Sin The ultimate management sin is: wasting people’s time. > It is not a meeting; it is a ceremony! > Meetings meet manager's need for reassurance. ### Status Meeting - purpose is to reach consenus - ad-hoc; not regularly scheduled > When bosses are needy, non-attendence is regarded as a threat. A fragmented team is teamicidal and is guaranteed to waste the individual's time from switching gears. The human capital invested in your work force represents a ton of money. The weekly status meeting is an obvious example. Although the goal may seem to be status reporting, the real intent is _status confirming_ which means the status of the boss. ### Early Overstaffing Meetings are not the only way that people’s time gets wasted. When staff is brought on too quickly at the beginning of a project, there is almost always a waste of people’s time. You might think this is an easy sin to avoid: Just figure out how quickly the work can absorb new people; then bring them on, only at that rate. Although this makes perfectly good sense, it is often politically infeasible. ## 33 E(vil) Mail ### Corporate Spam Most of the spam in your In-box comes from coworkers. An easy test for corporate spam is to apply some secure-organization thinking. - When security is key, information is routed on a need-to-know basis. - Imagine going through today’s e-mail onslaught, asking about each and every arriving message, - “Do I need to know this?” The ones that don’t pass this test are spam. ### Is This an Open Organization or a Commune? The phrase _open organization_ has a warm touchy-feely sound to it. It is nice if people allow you to pull information from them about what they are doing, but less nice if they push it on you. > Life is short. If you need to know everything in order to do anything, you are not going to get much done. ## 34 Making Change Possible ### People Hate Change They are not rejecting a particular change on its merits; they are rejecting any change. - Resistance to change - Satir change model (Figure 34-3) > The fundamental response to change is not logical but emotional. The reason the _Satir model_ is so important is that it alerts us that Chaos is an integral part of change. It is frustrating and embarassing to abandon approaches and methods you have long since mastered, only to become a novice again. ## 35 Organizational Learning Experience gets turned into learning when an organization alters itself: - instills new skills and approaches in its people - redesigns itself > Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people. The Management Team = made up of middle-management Teams of managers = teamicidal effects > One thing team needs to jell: ownership of work product. Learning happens in the white space. ## 36 The Making of Community "Politics, the Noble Science" by Aristotle 5 noble sciences: metaphysics, logic, ethics, politics, and aesthetics > Aristotelian politics is the key practice of good management. ---------- # Part VI: It’s Supposed to Be Fun to Work Here Somewhere deep in our ancestral memory is buried the notion that work is supposed to be onerous. If you are a manager, this vestigial memory requires you to make sure that your people never have any fun on the job. In Part VI, we address the idea that work should be fun. ## 37 Chaos and Order Constructive reintroduction of small amounts of disorder: - pilot projects - war games - brainstorming - training, trips, conferences, and retreats ### Pilot Projects - Documentary consistency but not functional consistency. - Do not experiment with more than one aspect of development technology. ## 38 Free Electrons ### The Cottage-Industry Phenomenon It’s hardly hot news these days that lots of our peers are working as cottageindustry entrepreneurs. They contract their time by the day, week, or even years for programming or design work or, sometimes, management. There are agencies that specialize in connecting these independents with organizations that need their talents. ### Fellows, Gurus, and Intrapreneurs Organizations are under increasing pressure to offer attractive in-house alternatives to their best people lest they become part of the cottage-industry phenomenon. - loosely stated responsibilities so that the individual has a strong say in defining the work. - blank check "Define your own job.” Our colleague Steve McMenamin characterizes these workers as “free electrons,” since they have a strong role in choosing their own orbits. The trend to create an increasing number of free electron positions is more than just a response to the threat of the cottage industry. The reason there are so many gurus and fellows and intrapreneurs and internal consultants in healthy modern companies is that companies profit from them. - The people in these positions contribute disproportionately to the organizations that employ them. - They are motivated to make the positions created for them pay off for their companies. ### No Parental Guidance In Soviet society, particularly among Communist Party members, there was a pervasive system of life counseling. - Virtually every member was assigned a counselor, someone to meet with on a weekly basis to help make life decisions, to iron out marriage and career problems, and to keep the political outlook in line. - The counselor served _in loco parentis_. To Westerners, this all seems terribly intrusive. - We feel that the individual needs to be left alone to work out such matters, or at least free to seek guidance if and when and from whomever he or she chooses. - But much of this fine individualism evaporates in the workplace. - We accept the wisdom that virtually everyone needs a firm direction, handed down from above. - Most people welcome a clear statement from the boss of just what specific targets are to be met in order to be considered a success. Most people need a well-defined charter, but managing the ones who don’t is another matter. > The mark of the best manager is an ability to single out the few key spirits and turn them loose: get out of their way. Such a manager knows that he or she really cannot give direction to these natural free electrons. They have progressed to the point where their own direction is more unerringly in the best interest of the organization than any direction that might come down from above. It’s time to get out of their way. ## 39 Holgar Dansk You should have been able to see your own situation reflected in at least a few of the essays. Each chapter has had some prescriptive advice, something that you could do to begin the sensible reconstruction of a project, a division, or a whole organization. These prescriptions encourage you to take on the Furniture Police, fight corporate entropy, defeat teamicidal tendencies, put more quality into the product (even if time doesn’t permit), repeal Parkinson’s Law, loosen up formal Methodologies, raise your E-Factor, open your kimono, and do a host of other things. It doesn’t take great prescience to see that one of these measures is all you are likely to pull off successfully. If you try more, you will just diffuse your efforts. Even a single substantive change to the sociology of your organization will be a mammoth accomplishment. The key to success in fostering the kind of change we’re advocating is that you not try to wrestle the bull. A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. When something is terribly out of kilter (such as too much noise in the workplace), it takes very little to raise people’s consciousness of it. Then it’s no longer just you. It’s everyone. ### Waking Up Holgar It does not 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.” Once it’s been said out loud, they can’t ignore it any longer. That may seem idealistic, but if you do wake up a sleeping giant in your company, you will not be the first: ---------- ## 29 Process Improvement Programs (2ed) ### The Paradox of Process Improvement Standards are good. Thank heavens for standards, for without them you wouldn't be able to put a Kodak film cartridge into your Minolta camera; the plug of your coffeemaker wouldn't fit the socket on the wall; the signal broadcast by your local radio station would be incomprehensible to your radio; your new phone would be incompatible with your telephone service; CDs wouldn't go into your player; faxes would be garbled; clothing and shoe sizes would make no sense; new tires wouldn't fit old cars; and the Internet would only be accessible to the people who invented it. Such standards are good, but it's worth pointing out that the great triumph of standards in the modern world is almost entirely the success of standard interfaces. - To extrapolate from the success of interface standards to the need for process standards is a bit of a stretch. - Identifying an ideal practice is a useful endeavor, but mandating such a practice is a bad idea. - Competent people are involved with process improvement all the time. - Formal process improvement moves responsibility from the individual to the organization (institutionalize). - Higher proficiency is unlikely to reduce risk. - The more you improve the way you go about your work, the harder the work will be. - As we make progress in process improvement, we need more talented people to do the work. - Focus on the Key Process Areas (KPAs), but turn off the institutional score-keeping. The projects most worth doing are the ones that will move you DOWN one full level on your process scale.