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People Ware PDF
People Ware PDF
June 8, 2003
Peopleware
Contents
1 Chapter 18: The whole is greater than the sum of all parts 3
The Guns of Navarone The goals of corporations are always going to seem arbitrary
to people. The goals in sports are always going to seem utterly arbitrary. The Universe
doesnt care who will win the sports game, but a lot of people get themselves very
involved in the outcome.
People who work in jelled teams have an aligned goal (They all try to accomplish the
same thing). They often get so involved that theyre psyched up enough to storm the
Guns of Navarone, all just to pass some acceptance test for the project-software.
A manager will always be strongly motivated toward goal attainment (goal completion),
so will the individual people in the team. Yet the purpose of the team is not goal
attainment but goal alignment.
low turnover
The team members arent going anywhere till the work is done
money and status matter less or not at all
a name for the group (i.e. Gang of Four, the Black Team, Chaos Group)
team members hang out during lunch or after work
sense of eliteness
team members feel that they are part of somehting unique and are probably
annoying to people who are not part of the group
team members are pleased to have their names grouped together on a product
or a part of one
obvious enjoyment
Teams and Cliques The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference
between a breeze and a draft. They have identical meanings: cool current of air.
If you find this cool current delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it annoying, you
call it a draft.
People use team when the tight bonding of the jelled team working group is pleasing
to them. And they use clique when it represents a threat. Fear of cliques is a sign
of managerial insecurity. Managers are often not true members of the team, so the
loyalities that exclude them are stronger than the ones that bind them into the group.
The loyalities within the group are stronger than those tying the group to the company.
of its own. This personality was beeing shaped by an adversary philosophy of testing
that evolved among group members, a philosophy that they had to want and expect to
find defects in the software.
At first it was simply a joke that the tests they ran were mean and nasty, and that the
team members actually loved to make your code fail. Then it wasnt a joke at all. They
began to cultivate an image of destroyers. To enhance the growing image of nastiness,
team members began to dress in black - hence the name Black Team.
same team, they tend to go into quiet mode at the same time, so there is less
interruption of flow.
Phony Deadlines: There certainly are cases where a tight but not impossible
deadline can constitute an enjoyable challenge to the team. Whats never going to
help, however, is a phony deadline. The work has been defined in such a way that
success is impossible and the message to the workers is clear: The boss is a robot
with no respect or concern for them. The boss believes that they wont get any
work done except under pressure.
Since there is a supermarket near by, they decide to go shopping and make dinner
together
Team-effects are beginning to happen as they roam through the supermarket (to-
tally un-organised, everyone throws things into the cart which they think are
needed) and the manager seems to have anything on her mind except dinner as
she keeps on telling stories
Back at the house there is still no general direction of who will do what but
the manager immediately starts chopping onions after someone suggests that this
would be needed
Gradually a dinner comes together which is then eaten with delight by everyone
Whats been going on here? So far, no work has gone into the project but the people
have just had their first success as a group: making dinner. Success breeds success, and
productive harmony breeds more productive harmony.
And the moral of the story: You have to look twice to see the managers hand in any of
this, it just seems to be happening. The best boss is the one who can manage this over
and over again without the team members knowing they have been managed.
The Getaway Ploy The most common means by which bosses defend themselves from
their own people is direct physical oversight. They wander through the work areas,
looking for people who are goofing off. The though of not doing this from time to
time is inconceivable to many managers. If youve got decent people under you, there is
probably nothing you can do to improve their chances of success more dramatically than
to get yourself out of their hair occasionally. Any seperable task is a perfect opportunity
to send the team away. Find a remote office, hire a conference room, borrow somebodys
summer house, put them up in a hotel or take advantage of off-season rates at ski areas
and beaches.
Have the team go to a conference and let them work together in peace for a few days.
Visual supervision is for prisoners.
In addition to making them more efficient, the getaway and the periods of total autonomy
give them an improved chance to jell into a high-momentum team.
There Are Rules and We Do Break Them; The Skunkworks Project: Skunkworks
implies that the project is hidden away someplace where it can be done without the up-
per managements knowing whats going on. This happens when people at the lowest
levels believe so strongly in the rightness of a product that they refuse to accept the
Chickens with Lips Note from frosty: I have no idea why they picked this title, it has
nothing to do with the following text.
The idea is to allow people at the lowest level some voice in team selection. The company
would post projects on a central kiosk and people would form themselves into candi-
date teams and then bid on jobs. This scheme gives people two unusual degrees of
freedom: They get to choose the projects they work on and the people they work with.
The suprising finding is that the first of these factors doesnt matter very much. The
management would, in this case, probably fear that only the glamorous project would
be bid for, but it doesnt happen that way. What seems to matter is the chance for
people to work with those they want to work with.
Whos in Charge Here? The best bosses take some chances. They take chances on
their people. None of this says that they dont give direction and make judgements of
their own. They have to do this all the time. The suggestion here is that they do this
only by exercising their natural authority. In the best organizations, there is natural
authority working in all directions. The manager is known to be better at some things,
perhaps setting general directions, negotiating, and hiring, and is trusted to do those
things. Each of the workers is known to have some special area of expertise, and is
trusted by all as a natural authority in that area. In this atmosphere of Open Kimono,
the team has its optimal chance to jell.