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/book_notes/slack |
Book Notes: Slack |
- My Notes
- On Schedules and deadlines
- On Deadlines
- On Overtime
- On Management
- Processes
- On star workers
- On Leadership
- On Change and Growth
An increasingly common bit of our organizational folklore holds that pressure improves performance and that maximizing performance an occur only in the pressence of maximum pressure
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 47 ()
My thoughts: IN FACT totally contrary to what programmers need. Max pressure on a programmer means shitty code.
(Lister's Law): People under pressure don't think faster
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 50 ()
Since (knowledge workers) can't alter the rate of mental discrimiations (bssic elements of knowledge work) per secnd their potential to respond to pressure is severly limited. All they can do is (a) Eliminate wasted time (b) defer tasks that are not on the critical path (c) stay late
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 51 ()
My thoughts: (c) reduce quality (either knowingly or 6 months from now realize work was bad)
(d) severly reduce future capability support in the software (aka: add tech debt or make bad choices such that future feature work goes slower than it could)
See p65 for more on this.
In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed 'aggressive' or 'highly aggressive' turn out to be fiascoes.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 54 ()
(on blame) performance is domain entirely of thse that perform the work
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 57 ()
My thoughts: Follow's my own experiences in blame the developer game!
Also: consider the work enviroment or culture too!
The people that set the schedule, not just the ones tht fail to meet it, need to be held accountable... Forcing a project unto an unrealistic schedule is dangerous for the company and has to be made dangerous as well for those that impose the schedule.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 58 ()
A variation on the uncertainity-is-for-wimps model is the culture where managers are allowed to show a little bit, but not a lot, of uncertainity. The ammount of declarable uncertainity is typically on the order of 5 percent... All that would be fine if the company
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 194 ()
My thoughts: {Think about it this way: 20% is a good tip at a diner. Or another way: 5 percent is less than sales tax. Real world examples - or prices - typically have a variant from published to what you actually pay, of > 5 percent!!!}
[a culturally set window of uncertainty baked into a project] would be fine if the company had a strong record of showing it regularly predicted results within (that window) of actual.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 195 ()
These are the invariable side effects of extended overtime:
- reduced quality
- personal burnout
- inreased turnover f staff
- ineffective use of time during normal hourse
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 64 ()
For example, in Soul of a new machine, the retrospective of Data General's overtime-intensive Eagle Project, the author, Tracy Kidder, reports that every single member of the Eagle Project was gone within a month of the end of the project. Even those that stayed on till the end (many didn't) were unable to continue working for the kind of company that had so used them.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 68 ()
My thoughts: They burnt up their entire knowledge based of the project! This project should be considered a failure - or at least a pyric victory - you won, but you lost.
Especially with nobody, really, to maintain and own the project and ensure its functional capacity remains high.
First law of bad management: if something isn't working, do more of it
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 80 ()
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 80 ()
My thoughts: RPW's correlary to the First law: if management isn't working, do more management (of course!)
Continuing stasis is a consequence of the first flawed assumption at the heart of MBO: the ingenuous belief that success of the overall organization can be viewed as a simple arithmetic combination of lower-level objectives.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 127 ()
The second flawed assumption of MBO is that the net contribution of something as large and complex as a corporate department can be reasonably approximated by a single indicator.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 129 ()
In point 12 of the Fourteen Points, Deming takes aim at MBO in all forms. MBO, Deming writes, provides artificial, extrinsic motivators - the objectives - which drives out workers intrinsic motivators.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 130 ()
The rule is (as with children) that trust be given slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness. But not too much in advance. You have to have an unerring sense of how much the person is ready for. Setting people up for failure doesn't ake them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 154 ()
The key role of middle-management is reinention.... The companes who today find themselves in statis are that way because they fired the very peope who were capabile of helping them get through the necessary change. They flattened themselves by getting rid of the change centers.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 160 ()
If the essential task of middle management is reinention, when is that task being carried out? The answer is, during time that is not used up direting the day to day business.... ... without the extra time / slack they could function in only their operational roles. Reinvention would be impossible beause the people who could make it happen are just too busy to take the time.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 160 ()
[Management traingin tends to teach] None of the really difficult things that distinquish good managers from bad: people selection and motivation, team jeling, listening, promotion, choosing correctly when to entrust new responsibility.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 169 ()
A team is a group of people who have joint responsibility for - and joint ownership for - one or more work products
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 170 ()
Companies that are succeeding have very little status. For example, the entire concept of 'production' is going away. Production implies a steady state. In its place we find a state of almost constant flux. The new central organizing principles is the project. A company in this kind of flux can be viewed as a portfolio of projects. Each project seems to effect some change.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 129 ()
My thoughts: At the org level: Very little status quo, but little slack to deal with changes the 'new new new way to do things' has brought to the organization??!!
At the project level: little slack at the project level means it's hard to get perspective time to (a) reflect on the work or business processes you've created (b) improve same (c) improve ie technical debt of the project or across teams.
Ideally ownership of a process is pushed downward. Instead of being a corporate asset, it is a team asset
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 106 ()
But:
- common team -> team interfaces?
- knowing the higher you are the less control you actually have over minutia?
To establish a stardarized way of doing any knowledge task, you end up focusing on the mechanics of the task. But the mechanics are a small and typically not very important portion of the whole. How the work goes on inside the nodes of the worker diagram is not so nearly important as how wide and rich the connections.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 107 ()
Standarizing processes for knowledge work are almost always empty at their center... Each of these standard says, in effect, 'I will dictate to you exactly how you must do every aspect of the work... except the hard parts'
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 109 ()
... only whatever standard evolves should happen at the level of the work itself. Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work.... Process standarization upon high is disempowerment.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 109 ()
But there were marked differences in how [the 360 degree assessment identified] star performers managed their network connections, liasons to fellow workers whose cooperation was required to get anything done. ... they had spread around favors, been responsive themselves, nursed relationships seen to other's essential human needs.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 107 ()
Directing an entire organization is hard. Seeming to direct it, on the other hand, is easy. All you have to do is note which way the drift is moving and instruct the organization to go that way.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 124 ()
... building effectiveness into an organization often comes in direct conflict with increasing efficency... The more optimized an organism (organization) is the more likely that the slack neccisary to help it become more efficent has been eliminated.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 124 ()
Meaningful acts of eadership usually cause people to accept some short term pain (extra effeort, delayed gratification) in order to increase the lng term benefit. We need leadership for this because we all tend to be shrt term thinkers.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 138 ()
Sufficent power is never a neccisary condition of leadership. There is never sufficent power. In fact, it is success in the absence of sufficent power that defines leadership... leadersip is not restricted to acting only downwards along the lines of organizational authority.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 140 ()
These steps often include items I have identified as barriers to change, such as reduced slack, standard process, poured-in-concrete processes and voluminous documentation of everything that will hold still for it... Slack is the lubricant that makes all these things possible. Vision and leadership, in particular, depend on degrees of freedom made available to the potential visionary or leader.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 131 ()
Drucker would have us look at the culture entirely differently, as the bedrock upon which any constructive change will have to rest.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 135 ()
It's a much more insidioous kind of fear that interferes with change: the fear of mockery. If you want to make change in your organiziation utterly impossible, try mocking people s they struggle with the new unfamiliar way you have just urged upon them. There is no surer way to stop esential change dead. The safety that is required for essential change is a sure sense that no one will be mocked, demeaned or belittled while strugling to ahiee mastery.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 149 ()
Contrary-wise, if there is no room (or budget or slack or runway) for failure then there will be no room for innovation: which sometimes in fact fails!!!!
Among the advantages are:
- a set of sensible approaches to change introduction
- A culture that is not change-phobic
- proper timeing
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 157 ()
Training = practice by doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it ... Any so called training experience that lacks the slow-down characteristic is an exercise in non-learning. Most corporate trainings fit easily into this category. You are given an input-only stage in which you ingest some new idea or approach, and then a performance stage in which you practice it. Only you don't get to practice it at a tenth the speed (or even nine-tenths the speed) that an expert would do it.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 178 ()
There is no training without an extended period of practicing at a much slower than expert rate. In today's Hurry Up corporation that usually means there is no training.
- From Slack by Demarco, Tom on page 179 ()