Excerpts from The Deadline – Tom DeMarco
I had never read "The Deadline" by DeMarco, but it turned up on my boss' desk one day and I borrowed it.
I thought it was an enjoyable read and only violently disagreed with his attempt to say that if we would just do more up-front design everything would be better (High-performance projects spend proportionately far more of their time in design).
Four Essentials of Good Management: (p.28)
Safety and Change (p.35)
Negative Reinforcement (p.46)
The Manager’s Essential Body Parts (p.59)
Battle Command As a Metaphor for Management (p.69)
Interviews and Hiring (p.69)
Productivity Improvement (p.83)
Risk Management (p.83)
Playing Defense (p.93-94)
Modeling and Simulation of the Development Process (p.115)
Pathological Politics (p.131-132)
Metrics (p.149-150)
Process and Process Improvement (p.161-162)
Changing the Way Work Gets Done (p.179-180)
The Effects of Pressure (p.199)
The Angry Manager (p. 209-210)
Ambigous Specification (p. 216)
Conflict (p. 225)
Roll of the Catalyst (p. 238)
Human Error (p.246)
Staff Level (p. 260)
Project Sociology (p. 275)
Pathological Politics (Again) (p. 288)
Lean and Mean (p. 299)
Radical Common Sense (p. 302)
Tom DeMarco, The Deadline (New York: Dorset House Publishing, 1997), http://www.dorsethouse.com/books/dl.html. Copyright (c) 1997 by Tom DeMarco. All rights reserved.