Tomkins continued his adventure in the mysterious land of Morovia, and it turned out more crazy than before. This is the second part of my «Deadline» by Tom De Marco blog reflections. If you are interested in the first part, where I talk about the first two chapters, visit to my entry: «Management’s Wonderland».
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 set up the structure in which the whole book will likely be presented: a special situation in Tomkins’ journey that he faces and analyzes at the end, drawing important conclusions regarding project management.
Chapter 3 introduces life in Morovia, how Tompkins will be involved and what his job will be. Turns out the leader of this strange land settled a zone called «Silikon Valejit», where hundreds of excellent software engineers were hired to produce 6 important projects. The main goal is to be one of the biggest software exporters by the year 2000 (this book was written in the 90’s).
Chapter 4 starts with Lahksa giving Tompkins a journal, with the first entry being some advice he gave out years ago in a seminar:
The essentials of Project Management:
- Get the right people
- Match them to the right jobs
- Keep them motivated
- Help their teams jell and stay jelled
The rest of knowledge is Administrativa, according to our main protagonist. They visit a man called Mopoulka, who is the lead behind one of the six projects: a CD-ROM plant that can produce all software products they will sell massively. Tompkins finds out that they were late development, but the reason why was that the lead was scared. Morovian dictator, called the NNL, threatened him to finish the project in a very short amount of time and with a fixed plan.
Tompkins then analyzes the strategy and finds that the plan must be changed for it to be a success, but the lead didn’t do anything because of fear. This gives us the main lesson of the chapter: people won’t embrace chance unless they feel safe. If a person feels in a good place to work, safe from harm, will likely work better and take risks in order to get the job done.
In the opposite scenario, where a manager threatens their people, everything will likely fail. This is the lesson of chapter 5, which introduces the NNL, and we discover that he was a US software engineer that bought THE WHOLE country of Morovia with his great richness from stocks. He clearly doesn’t have managerial skills, but Tompkins is here to save the day (or the project). Another important lesson is that if you don’t give people a reasonable amount of time for a project, it will likely fail also (unless you’re the infamous Steve Jobs and have abilities to distort time and space with ridiculous deadlines).
This story is beginning to kick off, and the content that I learned until this point is essential and very important. We will see what next chapters bring to the table.
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