What to do right to make your projects work, even if it may appear to be wrong

books:


	• Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior Tom Demarco, Peter Hruschka, ... Dorset House, 2008 - 248 pages average customer review:based on 10 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Highly recommended to anyone in charge of a group project

What makes a project successful or doomed - loved or hated? Those are the questions "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior" hopes to answer, looking critically at the archetypes of people and engineers that people constantly fall into, whether they know they are or not. Not afraid to take a humorous look at it all, it's a comprehensive guide that offers an example of what is a good and bad behavior coming from team members in management of a project. "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior" is highly recommended to anyone in charge of a group project and for community library business collections.

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Another classic from "those Peopleware guys"

The title and cover caught my eye (today!) in the bookstore and after flipping through, I couldn't wait to get home and blow through it.

It's clear why this is getting a 5-star average here @ Amazon. Written by the same folks who authored Peopleware (classic skilled-person management book), it contains ~80 patterns of project behaviour alternating between helpful and harmful.

Almost immediately I had several, "Ohhh yeah! That's what's going on!" moments. The authors do a terrific job of identifying patterns and the reasoning behind them. Being relatively new to a management gig, this sort of resource is invaluable. You might not be able to fix some of the issues, but you'll certainly be able to notice them more quickly - which is really the first step.

Each pattern is about 2-3 pages long, clearly identified in the table of contents and with pattern headings that stand out. This presentation allows me to quickly refer back to find out the suggested cure.

Most patterns are presented with prescriptive, corrective behaviour. Granted it's not a detailed dissertation on how to fix organizational issues, but enough to get an idea of the scope of the fix; work through it, or time to find another employer?

I'm already in the process of recommending this to my peers. It's such a brief, valuable read that anybody with skin in the game (from developers to CEOs) should give it a look.

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What to do right to make your projects work, even if it may appear to be wrong

I have been a fan of Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister for some time, their insights into the right way to manage information technology (IT) projects could be entitled, "The Way It Should Be Done." In this book, they are joined by their colleagues in the Atlantic Systems Guild to describe 86 project patterns, some of which you would enjoy being used to describe how you do things and others that you would avoid if you could. The descriptions are generally short, less than three pages and include a figure for emphasis.

Unless you have been blessed to a level that no one to my knowledge has ever been or you have never worked, then there will be patterns in this book that will cause your head to nod in agreement. Using colorful language on occasion and consistent blunt talk, the authors tell it straight, providing advice that pulls the façade off of some of the common notions of what makes a project work. Some of the titles of the patterns are:

Project slut
Rattle Yer Dags
One Throat to Choke
The Too Quiet Office
Everyone Wears Clothes for a Reason
What Smell?
Sanctity of the Half-Baked Idea
Seelenverwandtschaft
The authors are big advocates of creatively goofing off, arguing forcefully that the most productive teams are those that do things together that are anything but work related. Eating together, attending a movie, playing together in a band and a regular poker night are suggested ways to build cohesion and a sense of respect between the members of the development team. They also insist that some of these things should be done on company time.

The group is also strongly opposed to strict rigidity of any form, believing that a bit of chaos, animated discussion with disagreement and respectful truth telling are all signs of an efficient and productive team. In the "Miss Manners" pattern, they point out that extreme civility is misdirected and results in deep mediocrity. Everyone is subject to generating the occasional error or bad idea and if it is accepted rather than rejected for fear of hurting feelings, everyone suffers.

This past year, I authored a new major and minor program in Management Information Systems (MIS) for the college where I teach. Two of the upper level classes in the program involve the study of the proper ways to manage IT projects. This book will be used as a supplementary text when I teach those courses.

Published in the online Journal of Object Technology reprinted with permission

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Vaccine for Project Team Members

How can you keep from getting sick by infection? You need to build up immunity. There are two ways to do this. One is by surviving an earlier bout with the disease, and the other is by getting vaccinated.

Reading this book will "vaccinate" you against the negative project behaviors it describes, so that they can be recognized and dealt with before they cause project failures. Learning from the failures of others is a lot faster and cheaper than learning "the hard way" (by taking part in failed projects yourself). Get everyone on your team a copy, so that the cries of alarm cannot fail to be heard.

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A Book of Nuggets

With "Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior," The Atlantic Systems Guild team of DeMarco, Lister et al has done it again - a book about projects, project work and software development that is both useful and readable. I highly recommend this book.

Many books that relate to technical or managerial subjects are difficult to read - a lot of stuff you don't care about, and the occasional nugget. "Adrenaline Junkies" is a book of nuggets. Each chapter is a nugget or "pattern," including a phrase, a picture, a sentence and a couple of pages of descriptive text. One of my favorites, "News Improvement," refers to the tendency of bad news to be "improved" as it makes its way up the organizational chain. Another, "The Overtime Predictor," talks about how fear can drive people to overtime.

Not everyone will care about every pattern, but the book is organized in such a way that the reader has control over what to miss. Some patterns validated my own experiences. Some provided new insights. A couple I didn't get. My recommendation: read through the book, paying special attention to the patterns you care about. Skip some of the descriptive text if the pattern doesn't resonate with you, but first make sure you understand it. (Hint: the last paragraph of each pattern usually has a brief summary.) Then, when you're done, take a few minutes and go through all the patterns again to refresh your mind. That way, when you encounter these situations in real life, you'll remember the pattern. Even if that's all you can remember, you'll be able to refer back to the book for advice.

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reviews: page 1, 2

Adrenaline junkies, dead fish, project sluts, true believers, Lewis and Clark, template zombies . . .

Most developers, testers, and managers on IT projects are pretty good at recognizing patterns of behavior and gut-level hunches, as in, I sense that this project is headed for disaster.

But it has always been more difficult to transform these patterns and hunches into a usable form, something a team can debate, refine, and use. Until now.

In Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies, the six principal consultants of The Atlantic Systems Guild present the patterns of behavior they most often observe at the dozens of IT firms they transform each year, around the world.

The result is a quick-read guide to identifying nearly ninety typical scenarios, drawing on a combined one-hundred-and-fifty years of project management experience. Project by project, you'll improve the accuracy of your hunches and your ability to act on them.

The patterns are presented in an easy-reference format, with names designed to ease communication with your teammates. In just a few words, you can describe what's happening on your project. Citing the patterns of behavior can help you quickly move those above and below you to the next step on your project. You'll find classic patterns such as these:

* News Improvement
* Management By Mood Ring
* Piling On
* Rattle Yer Dags
* Natural Authority
* Food++
* Fridge Door
* and more than eighty more!

Not every pattern will be evident in your organization, and not every pattern is necessarily good or bad. However, you'll find many patterns that will apply to your current and future assignments, even in the most ambiguous circumstances. When you assess your situation and follow your next hunch, you'll have the collective wisdom of six world-class consultants at your side.

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