60 Quotes by Tom DeMarco

Productivity has to be defined as benefit divided by cost. The benefit is observed dollar savings and revenue from the work performed, and cost is the total cost, including replacement of any workers used up by the effort.

Rooms without a view are like prisons for the people who have to stay in them.

On the best teams, different individuals provide occasional leadership, taking charge in areas where they have particular strengths. No one is the permanent leader, because that person would then cease to be a peer and the team interaction would begin to break down.

In the most highly stressed projects, people at all levels talk about the schedule being “aggressive, ” or even “highly aggressive.” In my experience, projects in which the schedule is commonly termed aggressive or highly aggressive invariably turn out to be fiascoes. “Aggressive schedule,” I’ve come to suspect, is a kind of code phrase – understood implicitly by all involved – for a schedule that is absurd, that has no chance at all of being met.

Whether you call it a “team” or an “ensemble” or a “harmonious work group” is not what matters; what matters is helping all parties understand that the success of the individual is tied irrevocably to the success of the whole.

Overworked managers are doing things they shouldn’t be doing.