Two very interesting chapters with tons of value to learn from. The Deadline by Tom De Marco is getting more weird in these new chapters. The eight chapter begins with Lahksa telling Tompkins that they are going to meet a very important person: the eminent Dr. Rizzoli. He is a researcher and famous investigator for a lot of fields in project management. Fooled by morovian techniques, he thinks he is going to arrive in Latvia for a conference he was giving, but at the end he landed on Tompkins’ home.
In between breaks, both managers spent a lot of time together and had the opportunity to discuss the current tech project in Morovia. The biggest highlight that Rizzoli gave to Tompkins was at the field of risk management. He said that it is an excellent way to prevent wastes in production time, because risks are everywhere and managers have to keep them tracked. He suggested that he should create a document with all found indications of risks, write how they are triggered, when is possible that they can materialize and the cost they could have. This organizer is a perfect tool for decision making.
At last, they agreed on finding an efficient way to transport the bad news throughout the teams and projects. Sometimes people are ashamed and scared of telling the bad news, but if the problem is not reported at the right time it will snowball towards risks showing up. Tompkins was very motivated with this talk and was ready to apply it at the various projects he is in charge of. Time to say goodbye to Dr. Rizzoli.
Don’t worry, another interesting character arrives in the next chapter: general Makrov. They meet him and find out he is a retired morovian military general, and unlike his fellow partners who went outside the country to enjoy life’s pleasures, he stayed to work as manager of all engineers at work in the island. Controling a group of people THIS large is not an easy task, so Tompkins was eager to learn from him.
He learned four important things that day: first, that you need to find meaningful work to your employees, this decision will increase your productivity and motivation. He also learned that if a manager detects a current effort will be a loss no matter what strategy he uses, it should be cut off as soon as possible. It is part of a good risk management analysis. Then, he told him that in the phase of team creation, it is better to use an already jelled up team instead of forming a new one because they already are in sync and ready to work. One of the final project deliverables should be a jelled team. Finally, he became aware of the value of time, and found that a day lost in the beginning has the same weight as one day lost at later stages of a project.
Although short, these chapters gave us, the readers, and Tompkins invaluable knowledge that can be instantly applied to our projects. I’m looking forward next chapters and what they can offer. The last thing I will say is that «Rizzoli a la Makrov» sounds like an excellent Italian Russian-esque dish name. See you next time!
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