DeMarko T.Peopleware.Productive projects and teams.1999

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upholding a standard of prideful workmanship. All team members understand that the quality of the work is important to the organization, but the team adopts fr still higher standard to distinguish itself. Without this distinguishing factor, the group is just a group, never a real team.

Into this complicated mix, now imagine dropping a $150 framed poster to advise people that "Quality Is Job One." Oh. Gee, we never would have thought that. No sir, we sort of assumed—until this wonderful poster came along—that Quality was Job Twenty-Nine, or maybe Eleventy-Seven, or maybe even lower than that on the corporate value scale, maybe someplace after reducing ear wax or sorting the trash. But now we know. Thanks.

These motivational accessories, as they are called (including slogan coffee mugs, plaques, pins, key chains, and awards), are a triumph of form over substance. They seem to extol the importance of Quality, Leadership, Creativity, Teamwork, Loyalty, and a host of other organizational virtues. But they do so in such simplistic terms as to send an entirely different message: Management here believes that these virtues can be improved with posters rather than by hard work and managerial talent. Everyone quickly understands that the presence of the posters is a sure sign of the absence of hard work and talent.

That important matters like these should be the subject of motivational posters is already an insult. But the implementation makes it even worse. Consider an example marketed by one company: It shows a soft-focus image of sweating oarsmen, rowing in perfect unison through the misty morning. Underneath it reads, in part:

T«E»A«M»W«O«R«K

. . . The Fuel That Allows Common People To Attain

Uncommon Results

The "common people" they're talking about here are you and your workmates. Common people. (Don't take it too hard.) At least they're consistent in attitude: The same company's Leadership poster tells us that "the speed of the leader determines the rate of the pack." The pack. Yep, that's you again.

Motivational accessories are phony enough to make most people's skin crawl. They do harm in healthy organizations. The only place where they do no harm is where they are ignored—as

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in companies where the harm was done long, long ago and people have ceased to register any further decline.

Overtime: An Unanticipated Side Effect

You may already have picked up a certain bias in the book's original chapters against the use of overtime. It has been our experience that the positive potential of working extra hours is far exaggerated, and that its negative impact is almost never considered. That negative impact can be substantial: error, burnout, accelerated turnover, and compensatory "undertime." In this section, we examine yet another negative effect of overtime: its teamicidal repercussions on otherwise healthy work groups.

Imagine a project with a well-jelled team. You and your colleagues are producing good work at a rate that is frankly astonishing, even to you and your boss. You all understand this to be the beneficial effect of team jell, that the whole of your team production capacity is greater than the sum of your individual productivities. But it's still not enough. The powers that be have promised the product for June, and it's just not going to get done at the current rate.

Sounds like a case for a little overtime, right? You move the team into high gear, add a few hours to the workweek (still at the same high production rate), maybe work a few Saturdays. There is only one problem: One of your teammates—let's call him Allen—just doesn't have the flexibility that the rest of you enjoy. He is a widower and thus the primary care-giver for his little boy. Allen has to show up at the day-care facility at 5:15 each afternoon to pick the child up. As you might imagine, his Saturdays and Sundays, the only real quality time with his son, are inviolable.

Hey, that's okay, you think, we'll cover for Allen. We all understand. And you all do . . . in the beginning.

A few months later, however, the rest of you are starting to show the strain. All your Saturdays have been gobbled up, as have most of your Sundays. You've been working sixty-plus- hour weeks for longer than you thought possible, and your spouses and kids are grumbling. Your laundry is piling up, your bills are unpaid, your vacation plans have been scrapped. Allen, through all this, is still working a forty-hour week. Finally, somebody says what you are all thinking: "I'm getting pretty sick of carrying Allen."

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What's happened here? A team that was positively humming with the good effects ofjell has been pried apart by an overtime policy that could not be applied uniformly to the team members. But the members of good teams are never uniform in any respect, certainly not in their abilities to "borrow" time from their personal lives. In almost any team of four or five or six people, there are bound to be a few who can't be expected to put in the kind of overtime that might fit pretty well into some of the others' lives. All that can be shrugged off as unimportant if the overtime is only a matter of a few long evenings and maybe one extra weekend day. But if the overtime drags on over months and starts to exact a real toll on even the most willing team members, there is bound to be damage to team cohesion. The people who aren't sharing the pain will become, little by little, estranged from the others. And the team magic will be gone.

Extended overtime is a productivity-reduction technique, anyway. The extra hours are almost always more than offset by the negative side effects. This is true even if you don't consider the disruption of the team. When you take into account the way that the team members' differing abilities to work overtime tends to destroy teams, the case against it becomes persuasive.

Most managers have at least a suspicion that overtime doesn't help, that projects that work a lot of overtime are not much of a credit to their managers' skills and talents. But they end up allowing or encouraging overtime, anyway. Why is this? Jerry Weinberg has an answer of sorts: He suggests that 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 tune.

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ships as adults. Chances are that you know of at least one example of siblings who "don't speak" as adults, or the saddest extreme, entire families in which no two adjacent siblings have maintained a relationship into adulthood.

There is now a substantial consensus about the ways that parents encourage or discourage sibling competition. Competition is fostered when the children are emotionally undernourished by the parents, when there just isn't enough time, respect, attention, and affection to go around.

Conversely, when adult and young adult siblings are supersupportive of each other, when they obviously care a lot about each other and take evident pleasure in their friendship, you know that their parents have done something right.

Is it possible that internal competition in work teams is fostered by a manager's lack of time, respect, attention, and affection for his or her people? Though that may be too simplistic, we believe there is an important kernel of truth to the idea.

Does It Matter? The Importance of Coaching

What is the long-term effect of heightened competition among people who need to work together? One of the first victims is the easy, effective peer-coaching that is ubiquitous in healthy teams.

As a manager, you may have convinced yourself that you ought to be the principal coach to the team or teams that report to you. That certainly was a common model in the past, when hightech bosses tended to be proven experts in the technologies their workers needed to master. Today, however, the typical team of knowledge-workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the team members. What of the others? We are increasingly convinced that the team members themselves provide most of the coaching.

When you observe a well-knit team in action, you'll see a basic hygienic act of peer-coaching that is going on all the time. Team members sit down in pairs to transfer knowledge. When this happens, there is always one learner and one teacher. Their roles tend to switch back and forth over time with, perhaps, A coaching B about TCP/IP and then B coaching A about implementation of queues. When it works well, the participants are barely even aware of it. They may not even identify it as coaching; to them it may just seem like work.

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Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants. It also feels good. We tend to look back on significant coaching we've received as a near religious experience. We feel a huge debt to those who have coached us in the past, a debt that we cheerfully discharge by coaching others.

The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about some subject matter. You would be similarly crazy to coach someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance to pass you by.

Teamicide Re-revisited

Internal competition has the direct effect of making coaching difficult or impossible. Since coaching is essential to the workings of a healthy team, anything the manager does to increase competition within a team has to be viewed as teamicidal. Here are some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:

•annual salary or merit reviews

•management by objectives (MBO)

•praise of certain workers for extraordinary accomplishment

•awards, prizes, bonuses tied to performance

•performance measurement in almost any form

But hold on here, aren't these the very things that managers spend much or even most of their time doing? Sadly, yes. And yet these actions are likely to be teamicidal.

In his 1982 book Out of the Crisis, W. Edwards Deming set forth his now widely followed "Fourteen Points." Hidden among them, almost as an afterthought, is point 12B:

Remove barriers that rob people in management and in engineering of their right to pride of workmanship. This means [among other things] abolishment of the annual or merit rating and of management by objectives.

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Even people who think of themselves as Deming-ites have trouble with this one. They are left gasping, What the hell are we supposed to do instead?

Deming's point is that MBO and its ilk are managerial copouts. By using simplistic extrinsic motivators to goad performance, managers excuse themselves from harder matters such as investment, direct personal motivation, thoughtful team-forma- tion, staff retention, and ongoing analysis and redesign of work procedures.

Our point here is somewhat more limited: Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition. Managers need to take steps to decrease or counteract this effect.

Mixing Metaphors

We interrupt this message for ...

A STARTLING CONFESSION FROM THE AUTHORS

Throughout this book, we have used and discussed the sports team as a metaphor for a well-jelled technical work group; we are now obliged to emphasize here our growing disenchantment with this metaphor.

Most troubling to us these days is what the sports team metaphor implies about competition. Football teams and soccer teams and baseball teams compete within their leagues, but they also promote a good deal of internal competition. Those players who "ride the pines," for example, must feel just the littlest bit competitive toward the first string. Oh sure, they are rooting for them to win, of course, but perhaps not to look too great in the process.

In high school, I was the shortest member of our varsity basketball team. I still remember the guy who had to foul out before I would be put in. His name was Doug Timmerman. He was the most damnably gifted player; he almost never fouled anybody. I loved him like a brother, but still.. .

—TDM

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We have all seen sports teams that succeeded in spite of the failure of one of the individuals. We have also seen individual team members have a great night while their team was losing badly. The success or failure of the individual is thus disconnected from the success or failure of the group as a whole. This is an imperfect situation, one that only exacerbates any incipient tendency toward competition.

By contrast, as an example, a choir or glee club makes an almost perfect linkage between the success or failure of the individual and that of the group. (You'll never have people congratulate you on singing your part perfectly while the choir as a whole sings off-key.)

So, belatedly, we need to tell you that the musical ensemble would have been a happier metaphor for what we are trying to do in well-jelled work groups. We're not the only ones, of course, to use the term "team" to describe such a group.

Whether you call it a "team" or an "ensemble" or a "harmonious work group" is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

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and charters it to "establish standards of excellence for software engineering."

1987: First five-level scheme for assessing "software maturity3' published by the SEI.

1988: Publication of Watts Humphrey's instrumental paper, "Characterizing the Software Process: A Maturity Framework," in IEEE Software, March 1988. First assessments carried out and publicized. First public awareness of the Capability Maturity ModelsM (CMM).

1989: Formation of process groups, and first process support organizations. Publication of Humphrey's Managing the Software Process.

1990s: Proliferation of CMM in the U.S. DoD community and eventually beyond. Establishment of CMM target levels at many if not most large software organizations.

At the heart of the CMM is an ordered set of Key Process Areas (KPAs), each characterized by skills defined as progressively more and more essential. Based on proficiency in Key Process Area skills, the rankings are divided into five levels of organizational "maturity." Attainment of each level is determined not just by the number of skills mastered but by the order in which they are mastered (for example, there is no credit for mastering Level 4 skills unless the organization has already attained Level 3).

The Paradox of Process Improvement

Standards are good. Thank heavens for standards, for without them you wouldn't be able to put a Kodak film cartridge into your Minolta camera; the plug of your coffeemaker wouldn't fit the socket on the wall; the signal broadcast by your local radio station would be incomprehensible to your radio; your new phone would be incompatible with your telephone service; CDs wouldn't go into your player; faxes would be garbled; clothing and shoe sizes would make no sense; new tires wouldn't fit old cars; and the Internet would only be accessible to the people who invented it.

Such standards are good, but it's worth pointing out that the great triumph of standards in the modern world is almost entirely the success of standard interfaces. A standard for a screw thread or a AA battery or a tape cassette says a lot about the final prod-