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Fall '04 Perspective: The 1st Golden Rule |
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A dozen years ago or so, our Guild colleague Steve McMenamin distributed to Guild members the text of a talk that consultant Betsy Bernard had given at Southern California Edison. The talk was entitled The Seven Golden Rules. It listed seven rules of management that Ms. Bernard asserted were essential enough to justify the almost religious designation of Golden Rules. I made a simple list of Bernard's Golden Rules and have had it pinned on the margin of my monitor ever since. Betsy Bernard went on to become (briefly) the president of AT&T, and then made an even better move to become the ex-President when it became clear that that once proud company was bent on self-destruction. Her Seven Golden Rules have floated around the world and influenced many thousands of managers. (For an abbreviated text of her talk, click here.)
While all seven of her rules are pure gold to my mind, I shall dedicate this perspective to only one. It is the one that she listed first and entitled "Everybody's time is valuable." You can read her take on the subject in the linked pdf, but here I shall give it my own spin. The rule that everybody's time is valuable is only worth stating because so many managers act as if it weren't so. They say it is so, but then they don't act that way. They will tell you that their people's time is valuable, even invaluable, that it is the most precious resource of all and must not be wasted. But then they waste it. They waste it with innumerable meetings (often little star performances by — you guessed it — the manager). They waste it by making people do inessential and bureaucratic things, by a ton of process, by making them jump through hoops, by having them fill out forms and copy information from one place to another. Most of all they waste it by supplying zero clerical support, therefore assuring that even the most valuable and highly skilled developers have to stand at the copier, sort through test results, type and edit and format their own documentation and do a host of other tasks that could be done by far less skilled employees. So much of our developers' time is wasted by managerial fiat that some days they can't get a damn thing done. One manager asked me in exasperation "Why can't my people ever get through their work on time?" And my answer, after observing his organization for a while was that they couldn't get through their work because most days they never even got to their work. They were too busy doing all the administrivia that he and the organization had imposed upon them. Back in 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson observed that "Work will expand to fit the time allocated for it," now called Parkinson's Law. Managers everywhere know Parkinson's Law and are forever grumbling about it. They use it to justify stupidly low initial estimates that get their projects off on the wrong foot, and cause them to take as much as twice as long to complete as if they had been properly planned in the first place. It's worth remembering that Parkinson was first and foremost a humorist. He didn't write his law because it was so true; he wrote it because it was funny. The law is funny enough, but fundamentally flawed, and that's why acting as if it were true is so totally counterproductive. Parkinson's Law is just dead wrong for knowledge workers, particularly software developers. They tend to love their work and hanker desperately for closure. When they miss the schedule it's the schedule that's at fault, not their performance. Underallocating time doesn't help, it makes a bad situation worse. There is something rather like Parkinson's Law that is true in organizations like yours where software is developed. This revised law would look something like this: Administrivia expands to drive all work out of the working day. This is what's going on when the 1st Golden Rule is ignored. As a manger there is nothing you can do that's more important than making sure your people's time isn't wasted by you, by the organization around you, and by the ever increasing needs of process, documentation, and meetings. Tom DeMarcco — Camden, Maine, 1 Sept 2004 |
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Tom DeMarco