The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management

this loop describes a “pile-up” of overwork on an overburdened team: The team’s agenda is full. The fuller the agenda, the less time people take to sit down and fully explore issues in depth. Therefore, the team’s level of focus is scattered. The more scattered it is, the lower the level of shared understanding among team members. The lower

vision, lack of empowerment, the fact that it takes forever to get a decision made, and product work is turning into design by committee.

A software engineer identifies a weakness in your current product architecture that will significantly impair its ability to scale down the road. She figures out that she’ll have to slip the product schedule three months to fix it. Everybody agrees that three months is an acceptable slip to correct the problem. The schedule actually slips nine mont

Since software construction is inherently a systems effort—an exercise in complex interrelationships—communication effort is great, and it quickly dominates the decrease in individual task time brought about by partitioning. Adding more men then lengthens, not shortens, the schedule. Systems Test