Tom Demarco Quotes

#1. The top quartile, those who did the exercise most rapidly and effectively, work in space that is substantially different from that of the bottom quartile. The top performers' space is quieter, more private, better protected from interruption, and there is more of it. What

Tom DeMarco

#2. People under time pressure don't think faster." - Tim Lister Think rate is fixed. No matter what you do, no matter how hard you try, you can't pick up the pace of thinking.

Tom DeMarco

#3. Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept.

Tom DeMarco

#4. Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

Tom DeMarco

#5. A disturbing possibility is that overtime is not so much a means to increase the quantity of work time as to improve its average quality.

Tom DeMarco

#6. In 21 projects studied that same year, estimates were prepared by a third party, typically a systems analyst. The developers in these cases substantially outperformed the projects in which estimating was done by a programmer and/or a supervisor

Tom DeMarco

#7. Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about.

Tom DeMarco

#8. The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.

Tom DeMarco

#9. It's easy (and fair) to blame lousy management on lousy managers. But it's not enough. It's also necessary to blame the people who allow themselves to be managed so badly.

Tom DeMarco

#10. wasn't as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.

Tom DeMarco

#11. The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

Tom DeMarco

#12. Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.

Tom DeMarco

#13. The QSM Software Almanac is an invaluable resource. It establishes a norm for software projects, including best of class, worst of class and averages. In addition, it profiles the state of the art of software construction and enhancement. I wish I'd had this wonderful reference book years ago.

Tom DeMarco

#14. If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you're like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, "The light is better there."

Tom DeMarco

#15. If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

Tom DeMarco

#16. IBM actually followed the recommendations and built a workplace where people can work. (We predict this company will go far.)

Tom DeMarco

#17. Team jell takes time, and, during much of that time, the composition of the team can't 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 won't be a team at all.

Tom DeMarco

#18. There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.

Tom DeMarco

#19. in the best organizations, the short term is not the only thing that matters. What matters more is being best. And that's a long-term concept.

Tom DeMarco

#20. There is no such thing as "healthy" competition within a knowledge organization; all internal competition is destructive. The nature of our work is that it cannot be done by any single person in isolation. Knowledge work is by definition collaborative.

Tom DeMarco

#21. Quality takes time and reduces quantity, so it makes you, in a sense, less efficient. The efficiency-optimized organization recognizes quality as its enemy. That's why many corporate Quality Programs are really Quality Reduction Programs in disguise.

Tom DeMarco

#22. The best predictor of how much work a knowledge worker will accomplish is not the hours that he or she spends, but the days. The twelve-hour days don't accomplish any more than the eight-hour days. Overtime is a wash.

Tom DeMarco

#23. Lack of power is a great excuse for failure, but sufficient power is never a necessary condition of leadership. There is never sufficient power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficient power that defines leadership.

Tom DeMarco

#24. Meaningful acts of leadership usually cause people to accept some short-term pain (extra cost or effort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the long-term benefit. We need leadership for this, because we all tend to be short-term thinkers.

Tom DeMarco

#25. Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people.

Tom DeMarco

#26. The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.

Tom DeMarco

#27. Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

Tom DeMarco

#28. In order to enable change, companies have to learn that keeping managers busy is a blunder. If you have busy managers working under you, they are an indictment of your vision and your capacity to transform that vision into reality. Cut them some slack.

Tom DeMarco

#29. The most obvious defensive management ploys are prescriptive Methodologies ("My people are too dumb to build systems without them" ) and technical interference by the manager. Both are doomed to fail in the long run.

Tom DeMarco

#30. A policy of "Quality - If Time Permits" will assure that no quality at all sneaks into the product. Hewlett-Packard

Tom DeMarco

#31. A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change.

Tom DeMarco

#32. So far, the results confirm the folklore: Programmers seem to be a bit more productive after they've done the estimate themselves, compared to cases in which the manager did it without even consulting them. When the two did the estimating together, the results tended to fall in between.

Tom DeMarco

#33. Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible.

Tom DeMarco

#34. what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

Tom DeMarco

#35. Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

Tom DeMarco

#36. Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

Tom DeMarco

#37. First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

Tom DeMarco

#38. People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team.

Tom DeMarco

#39. What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity.

Tom DeMarco

#40. The most surprising part of the 1985 Jeffery-Lawrence study appeared at the very end, when they investigated the productivity of 24 projects for which no estimates were prepared at all. These projects far outperformed all the others

Tom DeMarco

#41. Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn't be doing.

Tom DeMarco

#42. It's possible to make an organization more efficient without making it better. That's what happens when you drive out slack.

Tom DeMarco

#43. Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone.

Tom DeMarco

#44. The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.

Tom DeMarco

#45. You can't control what you can't measure

Tom DeMarco

#46. 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 any sense at all.

Tom DeMarco

#47. Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.

Tom DeMarco

#48. The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

Tom DeMarco

#49. On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.

Tom DeMarco

#50. When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.

Tom DeMarco

#51. The statistics about reading are particularly discouraging: The average software developer, for example, doesn't own a single book on the subject of his or her work, and hasn't ever read one.

Tom DeMarco

#52. Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

Tom DeMarco

#53. Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters;

Tom DeMarco

#54. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

Tom DeMarco

#55. we don't work overtime so much to get the work done on time as to shield ourselves from blame when the work inevitably doesn't get done on time.

Tom DeMarco

#56. As long as people tend to define themselves at least partially in terms of the work they do, any change to that work, its procedures and modes, is likely to have self-definitional importance to them. This can lead to surprising amounts of change resistance.

Tom DeMarco

#57. Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

Tom DeMarco

#58. What I call bankruptcy of inventiveness is often the result of a failure to set aside the resources necessary to let invention happen. The principal resource needed for invention is slack. When companies can't invent, it's usually because their people are too damn busy.

Tom DeMarco

#59. What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.

Tom DeMarco

#60. Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.

Tom DeMarco