The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management

Hiring is only the most important thing a manager does.”

She certainly will. But we’ll ask her, as a favor, to do her growing on the next project. We’ll ask her to do one time for us what she has successfully done before for others. We’ll do that for each project, ask people to defer for a bit the chance to take on a real stretch goal, and repeat, just one time, what they already know they can do success

The manager has to learn to trust her gut, lead from the heart and build soul into the team and into the organization.”

What Kenoros proposed to teach the 18 teams was a technique called Last Minute Implementation, and it scared the hell out of Tompkins. The scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle 40% or more of the project doing an elaborate, exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect one-to-one mappings t

Project Sociology Keep meetings small by making it safe for unessential people not to attend. A published agenda, rigorously followed, is the easiest way to make non-attendance safe. Projects have need of ceremony. Use ceremony to focus attention on project goals and ideals: small meetings, zero defect work, etc. Take steps to protect people from a

Playing Defense Cut your losses. You can improve overall performance more by containing your failures than by optimizing your successes. Be aggressive about canceling failed efforts early. Don’t take chances on team jell if you don’t have to: seek out and use pre-formed teams. Keep good teams together (when they’re willing) to help your successors

Negative Reinforcement Threats are an imperfect way to motivate performance. No matter how serious the threat, the work still won’t get done on time if the time originally allocated for it was not sufficient. Worse still, if the target doesn’t get met, you may actually have to make good on your threats.

Staff Level Early overstaffing tends to force projects into shortcutting the key design activity (to give all those people something to do). When work is divided over a large staff prior to completion of design, the interfaces among people and among work groups are not minimized. This leads to increased interdependence, meeting time, rework, and fr

Do you think that’s because you have authority over us?” “Isn’t it?” “No. Wake up dummy. Your power comes from something else entirely.” “You’re saying people do what I want because they like me? Maybe that’s true, but how can I get Dr. Menotti to . . . .” “It’s not because they like you. It’s because you like them.” “Huh?” “You like and respect th