[...]... phone use is both good and bad, and in our revised ending to Chapter 11, we comment on what voice-mail has taught us about interruption and a sensibly managed work environment The new Part VI, Son of Peopleware, has chapters on teams and teamicide, process improvement programs, internal competition, change and change management, human capital, wasting time, organizational learning, and what we call Aristotelian... affected us in our own careers Not told in the original work is the story of Peopleware itself: how the book was written and what impact it had on its authors Peopleware, a book about partnership, was written by a partnership It is a book about teams and was itself put together by a team, including authors, editors, artists, and draft readers Most of all, the making of the book illustrated one of its... Sources of quoted material and other explanatory matter are presented in the Notes section, keyed to page number and to the Bibliography, where complete references are provided September 1987 —Tom DeMarco Camden, Maine —Timothy Lister New York, New York Peopleware Productive Projects and Teams 2nd ed PART I MANAGING THE HUMAN RESOURCE Most of us as managers are prone to one particular failing: a tendency... us are appliers of their work We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs Because we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions... and Suzanne Robertson, John Taylor, and Dave Tommela We are particularly indebted to the professional developersr who have participated in our productivity surveys and war game exercises in the years 1977 to 1987 Our thanks to all of them The philosophy expressed in these pages is in part the product of kind and caring managers we have worked with in the past Among these we list Johnny Johanessen and. .. development projects and their results We've measured project size, cost, defects, acceleration factors, and success or failure in meeting schedules We've now accumulated more than five hundred project histories, all of them from real-world development efforts We observe that about fifteen percent of all projects studied came to naught: They were canceled or aborted or "postponed" or 4 PEOPLEWARE they... thought we were done, but time and our correspondence and e-mail have convinced us otherwise We seem to have been nominated to serve as custodians of an international clearinghouse for peopleware- related developments Readers have written to us from all corners of the earth to report on new kinds of teamicide, attacks by the Furniture Police and counterattacks thereon, and all sorts of managerial silliness... huge success It wasn't obvious what she was adding, but projects always succeeded when she was around After watching her in class for a week and talking to some of her co-workers, I came to the conclusion that she was a superb catalyst Teams naturally jelled better when she was there She helped people communicate with each other and get along Projects were more fun when she was part of them When I... bully and cajole their people into long hours They impress upon them how important the delivery date is (even though it may be totally arbitrary; the world isn't going to stop just because a project completes a month late) They trick them into accepting hopelessly tight schedules, shame them into sacrificing any and all to meet the deadline, and do anything to get them to work longer and harder And Now... used For bigger projects, the odds are even worse Fully twenty-five percent of projects that lasted twenty-five work-years or more failed to complete In the early surveys, we discarded these failed data points and analyzed the others Since 1979, though, we've been contacting whoever is left of the project staff to find out what went wrong For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, . Cataloging-in-Publication Data DeMarco. Tom. Peopleware : productive projects and teams / Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister. 2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-932633-43-9 .