Tom DeMarco Quotes

Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about.

You can't control what you can't measure

There are a million ways to lose a work day, but not even a single way to get one back.

The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

Visual supervision is a joke for development workers. Visual supervision is for prisoners.

The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.

Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

What we are looking for is managers who are awake enough to alter the world as they find it, to make it harmonize with what they and their people are trying to accomplish.

Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept.

Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.

The fundamental response to change is not logical, but emotional.

When stress is the problem, slack is the solution.

Good management is the lifeblood of the healthy corporate body. Getting rid of it to save cost is like losing weight by giving blood.

The business we're in is more sociological than technological, more dependent on workers' abilities to communicate with each other than their abilities to communicate with machines.