Tom DeMarco Quotes & Sayings

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

When a schedule is not met, those inclined to pass out blame are quick to point at the lowest-level workers; they reason that performance is the domain entirely of those who perform the work. They ask plaintively, "Why can't these guys ever meet their schedules?" The answer that the schedule might have been wrong in the first place only befuddles them. It's as though they believe there is no such thing as a bad schedule, only bad performances that resulted in missing the scheduled date. There is such a thing as a bad schedule. A bad schedule is one that sets a date that is subsequently missed. That's it. That's the beginning and the end of how a schedule should be judged. If the date is missed, the schedule was wrong. It doesn't matter why the date was missed. The purpose of the schedule was planning, not goal-setting. Work that is not performed according to a plan invalidates the plan. The missed schedule indicts the planners, not the workers. — Tom DeMarco

A single person acting alone is not likely to effect any meaningful change. — Tom DeMarco

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

If you've been in the software business for any time at all, you
know that there are certain common problems that plague one
project after another. Missed schedules and creeping requirements
are not things that just happen to you once and then go
away, never to appear again. Rather, they are part of the territory.
We all know that. What's odd is that we don't plan our projects
as if we knew it. Instead, we plan as if our past problems are
locked in the past and will never rear their ugly heads again. Of
course, you know that isn't a reasonable expectation. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

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

First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it. — Tom DeMarco

The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work. — Tom DeMarco

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

In addition to being flat-out hard to do, building effectiveness into an organization often comes into direct conflict with increasing efficiency. This is an unfortunate side effect of optimization, first noted by the geneticist R. A. Fisher, and now referred to as Fisher's fundamental theorem: "The more highly adapted an organism becomes, the less adaptable it is to any new change." Fisher's example was the giraffe. It is highly adapted to food found up among the tree branches, but so unadaptable to a new situation that it can not even pick up a peanut from the ground at the zoo. The more optimized an organism (organization) is, the more likely that the slack necessary to help it become more effective has been eliminated. — Tom DeMarco

People who feel untrusted have little inclination to bond together into a cooperative team. — Tom DeMarco

Work gets done on the basis of its urgency alone. — Tom DeMarco

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

Healthy companies know that they have to allow people to fail without assessing blame. They have to do that or else no one will take on anything that's not a sure bet. Healthy companies know that, but Culture of Fear companies do not. In a Culture of Fear company, failure must be rewarded with punishment. ("What would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear?") A typical punishment is that you get fired. If the people above you are insufficiently powerful, some of them may get fired as well. This creates a powerful incentive to pass responsibility for failure on by blaming someone outside the organization. — Tom DeMarco

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

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day. — Tom DeMarco

Slackless organizations tend to be authoritarian. When efficiency is the principal goal, decision making can't be distributed. It has to be in the hands of one person (or a few), with everyone else taking direction without question and acting quickly to carry out orders. This is a fine formula for getting a lot done, but a dismal way to encourage reinvention and learning. — Tom DeMarco

Reinvention takes place in the middle of the organization, so the first requisite is that there has to be a middle. I'll assume your organization still has one. Now pour in some slack, increase safety, and take steps to break down managerial isolation. Viola, the formula for middle-of-the-hierarchy reinvention. — Tom DeMarco

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment. — Tom DeMarco

Risks and benefits always go hand in hand. The reason that a project is full of risk is that it leads you into uncharted waters. It stretches your capability, which means that if you pull it off successfully, it's going to drive your competition batty. The ultimate coup is to stretch your own capability to a point beyond the competition's ability to respond. This is what gives you competitive advantage and helps you build a distinct brand in the market. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

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

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

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

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

Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

Successful change can only come in the context of a clear understanding of what may never change, what the organization stands for. This is what Peter Drucker calls the organization's culture. Culture, as he uses the term, is that which cannot, will not, and must not change. We talk a lot about changing corporate culture, as though it were just another parameter of the organization, like an SIC code or address. But Drucker would have us look at culture entirely differently, as the bedrock upon which any constructive change will have to rest. If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. When there is no defining vision, the only way the organization can define itself is its stasis. Like the human creature that fights wildly to resist changing whatever it considers its identity, the corporate organism without vision will hold on to stasis as its only meaningful definition of self. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

How people feel can be more a factor in the success of a change than what they think. Anxiety of any kind can only complicate the task of change introduction. That's why the period of sudden decline of corporate fortunes is exactly the worst moment to introduce a change. People are uneasy about their jobs, worried about lasting corporate health, perhaps shocked by the vitality of the competition. In retrospect, a far better time to introduce the change would have been back in the period of healthy growth. Growth always carries with it a certain necessity for change. You may have to hire more people, expand to larger quarters, diversify or centralize, all to accommodate your own burgeoning success. But growth feels good; it feels like winning. It even feels good enough to reduce the amount of change resistance. — Tom DeMarco

In a healthy organization, a certain amount of failure is okay. At Microsoft, for example, there has long been an almost official policy of "sink, then swim." People are loaded down with so much responsibility that they sink (fail). Then they have a chance to rest up, to analyze and modify their own performance. Finally, they are loaded again with a comparable amount of responsibility, but this time they succeed. If they don't sink the first time, that just shows they weren't challenged enough. They can be sure that the next time out they will be challenged a lot more aggressively. To the extent that this policy is applied company-wide, Microsoft seems to be run as an Outward Bound adventure. Finding your weaknesses by failing is not just incidental; it is designed into the corporate philosophy. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

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

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

what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole. — Tom DeMarco

Managers who inspire extraordinary loyalty from their people tend to be highly charismatic, humorous, good-looking, and tall. So, by all means, strive to be those things. If you don't feel able to improve any of those factors very much, you might consider holding on to your people by designing a little slack into their lives. — Tom DeMarco

The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional. — Tom DeMarco

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

What chaos is left in modern society is a precious commodity. — Tom DeMarco

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

It's nontrivial for a company and everyone in it to know "who we are." A little bit easier, however, is to know "who we aren't." When even that knowledge is missing - when there is no basis in the company to say about a given cockamamy scheme "it just isn't us" - the company clearly lacks vision. Vision implies a visionary. There has to be one person who knows in his or her bones what's "us" and what isn't. And it can't be faked. Employees can smell an absence of vision the way a dog can smell fear. — Tom DeMarco

You can't control what you can't measure — Tom DeMarco

When stress is the problem, slack is the solution. — Tom DeMarco

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. — Tom DeMarco

Although your staff may be exposed to the message "work longer and harder" while they're at the office, they're getting a very different message at home. The message at home is, "Life is passing you by. Your laundry is piling up in the closet, your babies are uncuddled, your spouse is starting to look elsewhere. There is only one time around on this merry-go-round called life, only one shot at the brass ring. And if you use your life up on C++ . . . — Tom DeMarco

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

I've written about the giving of trust as though it were a simple formula for building loyalty. But it isn't simple at all. The talent that is an essential ingredient of leadership tells the leader whom to trust and how much to trust and when to trust. 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 make them loyal to you; you have to set them up for success. Each time you give trust in advance of demonstrated performance, you flirt with danger. If you're risk-averse, you won't do it. And that's a shame, because the most effective way to gain the trust and loyalty of those beneath you is to give the same in equal measure. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

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

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners. — Tom DeMarco

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters; — Tom DeMarco

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed. — Tom DeMarco

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back. — Tom DeMarco

Paradoxically, the fear of breaking your neck (translation in corporate terms: losing your job) does not make change impossible. It's a much more insidious kind of fear that interferes with change: the fear of mockery. If you want to make change in your organization utterly impossible, try mocking people as they struggle with the new, unfamiliar ways you have just urged upon them. There is no surer way to stop essential change dead. The safety that is required for essential change is a sure sense that no one will be mocked, demeaned, or belittled while struggling to achieve renewed mastery. — Tom DeMarco

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

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

Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn't be doing. — Tom DeMarco

Ownership of the standard should be in the hands of those who do the work. — Tom DeMarco

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

Any vigorous competition will entail at least two elements: offense and defense. Offense is the effort you put into scoring against your opponents, and defense is the effort you apply to stop them from scoring against you. Those who suggest that "a little healthy competition can't hurt" are thinking only of the offense part....

The offense component of internal competition is problematic, but the defense component is always injurious. When peer managers play defense against each other (try to stop each other from scoring), they are engaging in anticooperation. — Tom DeMarco

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

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack. — Tom DeMarco

Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people. — Tom DeMarco