Tom DeMarco

Tim Lister

DeMarco and Listers "Physical Exam" for Your Software Organization

The Problem:

     Modern companies are so insular that most have little idea how they might stack up against their peer organizations. Of course, competition requires that you keep your cards close to your chest. But the downside of being that insular is that you have no way to know if your state of practice is better than, worse than, or about equal to that of others in the industry.
     In software particularly, maintaining a reasonable state of practice is essential to health and survival. Knowing where you stand is the first step in any effort to improve practice.

A Unique Solution:

     Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister provide an opportunity for a tailored and very non-threatening appraisal of your software organization. They meet with project teams for half a day each. The focus is on methods, management, quantification, quality efforts and team dynamics. The two appraisers keep an eye out for outlying practices, those that lie outside the norm, either in a good or bad sense. Both kinds are valuable: the good outliers are your competitive edge, something you need to nurture and capitalize upon; the bad outliers are your best opportunity for quick, cheap improvement.
     During the last half day of the event, Tim and Tom present their findings back to participants (or to the entire organization, if desired). They make a 90 minute stand-up talk on the subject of your organization, its strengths and weaknesses, its opportunities and challenges.

Who Are These Guys?

   Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister are the authors of Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams [Dorset House Publishing, 1987 and 1997], the best selling and highly innovative book on building successful corporate culture. They are also the compilers of Software State of the Art and the one-hour video teams tutorial [both from Dorset House].

Timothy Lister

     Timothy Lister is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc., based in the New York office. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing.
     Mr. Lister's most recent involvement is in tailoring methodologies and selecting tools for software development groups to increase project productivity, and product reliability. He is currently consulting for two organizations, each with more than 300 developers. He is also pursuing work on metrics for making software project efforts more predictable.

Tom DeMarco

     Tom DeMarco is a principal of the Atlantic Systems Guild, a computer systems think tank with offices in the US. and Great Britain. He was the winner of the 1986 Warnier Prize for "lifetime contribution to the field of computing."
     He is the author of The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management [Dorset House, 1997], Why Does Software Cost So Much (And Other Puzzles of the Information Age) [Dorset House, 1995], Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement and Estimation, [Prentice Hall, 1982], Structured Analysis and System Specification [Prentice-Hall, 1979], and of more than one hundred articles and papers about management and the system development process.
     Mr. DeMarco specializes in real time and engineering projects and their management.



For prices and availability, contact Tom DeMarco by phone at 207 236-4735.

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