For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects we studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.

Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure whatsoever (“Just wake me up when you’re done.”) had the highest productivity of all.

The systems analyst tends to be a better estimator than either the programmer or the supervisor. He or she typically knows the work in as much detail, but is not hampered by the natural optimism of the person who’s actually going to do the job or the political and budgetary biases of the boss. Moreover, systems analysts typically have more estimati

She was a walking example of much of what I now think of as enlightened management. One snowy day, I dragged myself out of a sickbed to pull together our shaky system for a user demo. Sharon came in and found me propped up at the console. She disappeared and came back a few minutes later with a container of soup. After she’d poured it into me and b

(Forget for a moment that Parkinson supplied no data at all to prove that the law did apply, he just reiterated it for a few hundred pages.)

That’s not exactly productivity—it’s more like fraud

When you first start measuring the E-Factor, don’t be surprised if it hovers around zero. People may even laugh at you for trying to record uninterrupted hours: “There is no such thing as an uninterrupted hour in this madhouse.” Don’t despair. Remember that you’re not just collecting data, you’re helping to change people’s attitudes.

Those who coded in old languages like COBOL and Fortran did essentially as well as those who coded in Pascal and C.

The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux. Someone who can help a project to jell is worth two people who just do work.