PeopleWare (Productive Projects and Teams)

Finally, after a good deal of months, I’ve been able to read another book; PeopleWare is a book by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister on how organization affects team productivity. This book is especially targeted to software developers but its theories can as well fit for all intellective jobs. Topics covered by the book regard:

• Work environment: how bad structured environment (one among all, the open space!), noise, interruptions and time fragmentation impact on work flow and, as a consequence, on efficiency
• Overtime: as an abused method, adopted as a normal practice, to complete projects under unrealistic time-constraints. This affects worker’s life-balance, increase turnover rate and lower product quality
• Methodology and Standards: as a top-down policy which impose to workers adopting practices whose effectiveness hasn’t been proven and which load the execution with tons of paper job (I suggest the part dedicated to CMMI)

To roughly summarize, PW sustain that managers should enable the people to work instead of making them. This is an interesting idea which means also that managers should trust his subordinates also by letting them do mistakes (who doesn’t?).

Suggested book, pleasant to read and with a viewpoint on work which I agree. To be fair it should be paired with a book advocating the opposite theory (rigid boss-subordinates organization, standards-and-methodologies, etc…).

The Future of Work (How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life)

Thomas Malone is professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses mainly on the design of new organizations, especially the business related ones. His book “The Future of Work” explains how the informations exchange cost affects the organizations structure; Malone’s theory is that the fall of information transmission cost lead to a decentralized structure (in governments as in business companies). TFOW reports organizations on a continuum line going from centralized hierarchies (the most controlled structures) to markets (the least controlled ones) relating the members freedom to the costs of information transmission among them. The clues given in the text offer significant insights to how business organizations can look like in the future (I’ve particularly appreciated the ELance idea) and how can be efficiently managed (shifting from coomand-and-control to coordinate-and-cultivate model) but I think the book lacks of a structured framework to approach this topic. In addition the last chapter has little to do with the other ones (in my opinion).

Interesting text but not conclusive as I hoped.