Clayton’s Weblog

Lately I’ve been reading more software engineering/development books, especially those with more of a project management slant.  I got a copy of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams in the mail today and I’m about 30 pages into it and so far I’m really digging it.  I particularly liked this quote which was mentioned in a section about Parkinson’s Law:

In a healthy work environment, the reasons that some people don’t perform are lack of competence, lack of confidence, and lack of affiliation with others on the project team, and the project goals.  In none of these cases is schedule pressure liable to help very much.  When a worker seems unable to perform, and seems not to care at all about the quality of his work, for example, it is a sure sign that the poor fellow is overwhelmed by the difficulty of the work.  He doesn’t need more pressure.  What he needs is reassignment, possibly to another company.

As an aside, I also finished reading Rapid Development over the holidays, and it’s what got me thinking about this sort of thing in general.  I had someone at work the other day ask me why I’ve started reading more about this sort of thing, and I think the first few pages of Peopleware kind of summed it up.  Most of the problems on most software projects aren’t with the software, but it’s what most people would call office politics, and what I see as more of as project management and process issues.  I didn’t really have to deal with this sort of thing much at RCN, but with larger groups working on projects at TWC, it’s definitely something I have to deal with on a regular basis.