Fired up IT

Early in my management career, I was leading an incredibly demanding development project for a new business unit within a large company. The deadline was tight, and workspace was in such short supply that the team started out working in a conference room. Eventually, we squeezed most of the team into more respectable quarters, but one of the top developers had to be placed at the edge of a noisy newsroom. He complained of the constant buzz, but I just told him to do his best, and we pushed on. Looking back, that project withstood several mistakes.

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I just finished Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister, a guided tour of worker-related management mistakes that I’ve been guilty of myself. As the authors note, the major problems of technical work are not so much technological in nature as sociological. Peopleware summarizes the keys to successful people-management in IT and provides plenty of hard data to help managers avoid common pitfalls.

Protecting the productivity of your top performers is essential to managing successful projects. According to studies cited in the book, the best people will outperform the worst by about 10-to-1. The best performer will outperform a median performer by 2.5 times. Finally, on average, the one-half of performers who are better-than-median will typically outdo the other half by 2-to-1.

The authors also explore physical work environments and the major difference they make in the quality of work produced, specifically the noise levels of developers’ workspaces. The authors point to data that strongly suggests developers who have inadequate workspace make more errors and are substantially less productive than those with proper workspace, so money ostensibly saved by shaving facilities costs can be quickly lost.

Obviously, hiring well is key, but the authors assert that good managers hardly play a role in molding employees into successful contributors after they are hired. The best managers know how to hire good people, then step out of the way. Good managers spend their time creating compelling work environments that will result in a “jelled team,” a central concept in the book.

The jelled team is so tightly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. There is low turnover, a strong sense of identity, a sense of elitism, joint ownership of products, and enjoyment derived from participation. Making a team “jell” is difficult, but there are clear ways to harm teams. Of the six listed, I unwittingly committed at least three in the project I mentioned at the start.

The high cost of turnover gets a lot of attention in the book. The authors point out a common characteristic among companies that enjoy low turnover: a preoccupation with being the best. At companies with high retention, talk of being the best pervades the workplace — in the formality of meetings and in the informality of hallway interactions. A “mentality of permanence” gives employees a sense that they are expected to stay with the company.

Finally, here’s a nugget worth quoting: “The essence of successful management is to get everyone pulling in the same direction and then somehow get them fired up to the point that nothing, not even their manager, could stop their progress.”

Good advice. You’ll find plenty of it in Peopleware.