Tom DeMarco - Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition)

Productive Projects and Teams

Third Edition

Tom DeMarco
Timothy Lister

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

DeMarco, Tom.
Peopleware : productive projects and teams / Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister.
Third edition.
pages cm
Includes index.
ISBN13: 978-0-321-93411-6 (alk. paper)
ISBN10: 0-321-93411-3 (alk. paper)
1. Management. 2. Organizational behavior. 3. Organizational effectiveness.
4. Project management. I. Lister, Timothy R. II. Title.
HD31.D42218 2014
658.4022--dc23 2013010087

Copyright 2013, 1999, 1987 by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister

All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. This publication is protected by copyright, and permission must be obtained from the publisher prior to any prohibited reproduction, storage in a retrieval system, or transmission in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or likewise. To obtain permission to use material from this work, please submit a written request to Pearson Education, Inc., Permissions Department, One Lake Street, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458, or you may fax your request to (201) 236-3290.

ISBN-13: 978-0-321-93411-6
ISBN-10: 0-321-93411-3
Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelley in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
First printing, June 2013

The Great Oz has spoken.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The Great Oz has spoken.
The Wizard of Oz

To all our friends and colleagues who have shown us
how to pay attention to the man behind the curtain.

What we have come to think of as the Peopleware project began for us during the course of a long night flight over the Pacific more than thirty years ago. We were flying together from L.A. to Sydney to teach our Software Engineering Lectures series. Unable to sleep, we gabbed through the night about the deep complexities we were encountering in systems projects of our own and the ones related to us by our clients. One of usneither one can remember which it wasreflected back over what wed been discussing and offered this summing up: Maybe... the major problems of systems work are not so much technological as sociological.

It took a while for that to sink in because it was so contrary to what had been our thinking before. We, along with nearly everyone else involved in the high-tech endeavors, were convinced that technology was all, that whatever your problems were, there had to be a better technology solution to them. But if what you were up against was inherently sociological, better technology seemed unlikely to be much help. If a group of people who had to work together didnt trust each other, for example, no nifty software package or gizmo was going to make a difference.

Once the idea was out in the open, we began to think up examples, and it soon became clear to both of us that the social complexities on most of the projects wed known simply dwarfed any real technological challenges that the projects had had to deal with. And then, inevitably, we needed to face up to something far more upsetting: While we had probably known in our bones for a long time that sociology mattered more than technology, neither of us had ever managed that way. Yes, we had done things from time to time that helped teams work better together or that relaxed group tensions, but those things had never seemed like the essence of our work.

How would we have managed differently if wed realized earlier that the human side mattered much more than the tech side? We started making lists. We had blank acetates and foil pens handy, and so we put some of the lists onto overhead slides and thought giddily of actually presenting some of these ideas to our Sydney audience. What the hell! Sydney was half a globe away from the States and Europe; if we bombed in Australia, who would ever know of it back home?

Our Sydney audience the next week was immediately engaged by the peopleware material, and a bit chagrined (evidently we werent the only ones who had been managing as if only the technology really mattered). Best of all, people chimed in with lots of examples of their own, which we cheerfully appropriated.

What separated that early out-of-town tryout from the first edition of the book in 1987 was a ton of work conducting surveys and performing empirical studies to confirm what had been only suspicions about the effects of the environment ( of this third edition) and to validate some of our more radical suggestions about team dynamics and communication (most of the rest of the book).

Peopleware in its first two editions made us a kind of clearinghouse for ideas about the human side of technology projects, and so our thinking has had to expand to keep up. New sections in this third edition treat some pathologies of leadership that hadnt been judged pathological before, an evolving culture of meetings, hybrid teams made up of people from seemingly incompatible generations, and a growing awareness that, even now, some of our most common tools are more like anchors than propellers.