《PeopleWare》读书笔记

PeopleWare: Productive Projects and Teams

在项目中与人相关的问题比技术上的问题更重要。
The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature.
技术上的问题更简单，所以管理上也更容易在这上面下功夫。
The main reason we tend to focus on the technical rather than the human side of the work is not because it's more crucial, but because it's easier to do.

研发不同与生产性的工作。
Development is inherently different from production.

Imagine for the moment that you're the manager of the local fast food franchise. It makes perfect sense for you to take any or all of the following efficient production measures:
? Squeeze out error.  Make the machine (the human machine) run as smoothly as possible. 严谨出错
? Take a hard line about people goofing off on the job. 禁止混时间，时刻要忙碌
? Treat workers as interchangeable pieces of the machine. 人员可随时更换
? Optimize the steady state.  (Don't even think about how the operation got up to speed, or what it would take to close it down.) 保持现状
? Standardize procedure. Do everything by the book. 标准化流程
? Eliminate experimentation—that's what the folks at headquarters are paid for. 不要进行试验
而若要进行研发工作，则要做法相反。
To manage thinking workers effectively, you need to take measures nearly opposite those listed above.

允许犯错，鼓励尝试。
A Quota for Errors
For most thinking workers, making an occasional mistake is a natural and healthy part of their work.
Fostering an atmosphere that doesn't allow for error simply makes people defensive. They don't try things that may turn out badly.

驱赶人们去工作并不会产生创造性
Management: The Bozo Definition
You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.

每个人都具有独特的属性，而不同于机器零件。
The People Store
In a production environment, it's convenient to think of people as parts of the machine.  When a part wears out, you get another.
The natural people manager, on the other hand, realizes that uniqueness is what makes project chemistry vital and effective.

保持现状的研发工作就是死胡同，要保持项目的动态性
A Project in Steady State Is Dead
Unless you're riding herd on a canceled or about-to-be-canceled project, the entire focus of project management ought to be the dynamics of the development effort.
The catalyst is important because the project is always in a state of flux.

做事前要想清楚，构思规划明白，不要盲目就去做。
We Haven't Got Time to Think About This Job, Only to Do It
The steady-state cheeseburger mentality barely even pays lip service to the idea of thinking on the job. Its every inclination is to push the effort into one hundred percent do-mode.
The project that has to be done by an impossible fixed date is the very one that can't afford not to have frequent brainstorms and even a project dinner or some such affair to help the individual participants knit into an effective whole.

加班就像是短跑，而项目进行往往是需要长跑。
Overtime is like sprinting: It makes some sense for the last hundred yards of the marathon for those with any energy left, but if you start sprinting in the first mile, you're just wasting time. Trying to get people to sprint too much can only result in loss of respect for the manager.

以下是组织用于提高生产率的办法：
Some of the things that organizations typically do to improve productivity:
? pressure, people to put in more hours  压力
? mechanize the process of product development 标准化过程
? compromise the quality of the product  牺牲质量
? standardize procedures
Any of these measures can potentially make the work less enjoyable and less satisfying. Hence, the process of improving productivity risks worsening turnover.

压力下的工作虽然更快，但未必好，而且还牺牲了人们的满足感。
People under time pressure don't work better; they Just work faster. In order to work faster, they may have to sacrifice the quality of the product and their own job satisfaction.

新手管理者认为工作要不涉及人们的感情，但事实并不如此。
A novice manager may believe that work can be completed without people's emotions ever getting involved but if you have any experience at all as a manager, you have learned the opposite. Our work gives us plenty of opportunity to exercise the emotions.

帕金森定律鼓励设置不合理的期限。
Parkinson's Law gives them the strongest possible conviction that the only way to get work done at all is to set an impossibly optimistic delivery date. Parkinson's Law almost certainly doesn't apply to your people.
不可能达到的期限会牺牲产品质量，从而会带来严重后果。
Managers jeopardize product quality by setting unreachable deadlines.

管理者要使人们的工作变得容易。
The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

办公环境、办公设施会对人们的生产率产生重要的影响。

干扰是注意力的大敌。而许多脑力劳动都需要高度注意力，在“流”的状态下完成，需要没有干扰。
During single-minded work time, people are ideally in a state that psychologists call flow. Flow is a condition of deep, nearly meditative involvement. In this state, there is a gentle sense of euphoria, and one is largely unaware of the passage of time: "I began to work. I looked up, and three hours had passed." There is no consciousness of effort; the work just seems to, well, flow. You've been in this state often, so we don't have to describe it to you.

Not all work roles require that you attain a state of flow in order to be productive, but for anyone involved in engineering, design, development, writing, or like tasks, flow is a must. These are high-momentum tasks.  It's only when you're in flow that the work goes well.

要留住合适的人才，让他们感到舒适，并充分信任。
Modem management science pays almost no attention to hiring and keeping the right people.
? get the right people
? make them happy so they don't want to leave
? turn them loose

形式主义和繁文缛节对生产率有害。

凝聚力强的团队，整体大于部分之和。
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
他们有强烈的认同感、精英感，对产品具有拥有感，且乐于工作。
Signs of a Jelled Team
Jelled teams are usually marked by a strong sense of identity.
There is a sense of eliteness on a good team.
There is invariably a feeling of joint ownership of the product built by the jelled team.
The final sign of a jelled team is the obvious enjoyment that people take in their work.

团队和派系实际上是一个意思。
The difference between a team and a clique is like the difference between a breeze and a draft. Breeze and draft have identical meanings: They both mean "cool current of air."  If you find that cool current of air delightful, you call it a breeze; if you find it annoying, you call it a draft.
People use team when the tight bonding of the jelled working group is pleasing to them. And they use clique when it represents a threat.

对派系的恐惧来源与管理上的不安全感。
Fear of cliques is a sign of managerial insecurity.

We stopped talking about building teams, and talked instead of growing them. The agricultural image seemed right.

Our short list of teamicide techniques is presented below:
? defensive management
? bureaucracy
? physical separation 不在一起工作
? fragmentation of people' s time
? quality reduction of the  product
? phony deadlines
? clique control

人性关怀

Presented below is an admittedly simplistic list of the elements of a chemistry-building strategy for a healthy organization:
? Make a cult of quality.
? Provide lots of satisfying closure.
? Build a sense of eliteness.
? Allow and encourage heterogeneity.
? Preserve and protect successful teams.
? Provide strategic but not tactical direction.

对工作进行小的结尾，从而让员工有成就感。
Closure for the organization is the successful finish of the work as assigned, plus perhaps an occasional confirmation along the way that everything is on target (maybe a milestone achieved or a significant partial delivery completed).
The problem here is that organizations have far less need for closure than do the people who work for 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.

The structure of a team is a network, not a hierarchy. For all the deference paid to the concept of leadership (a cult word in our industry), it just doesn't have much place here.

A little bit of heterogeneity can be an enormous aid to create a jelled team.

团队内的竞争有一定害处。
If team members are told, for example, that only the best one of them will be around next year, you can be sure that they will not succeed in working together very well.

Highly competitive siblings grow up to be distanced from each other, while those who are less competitive as children have at least a chance of building warm sibling friendships as adults.

团队内的自我coaching
Today, the typical team of knowledge-workers has a mix of skills, only some of which the boss has mastered. The boss usually coaches only some of the team members.  What of the others? We are increasingly convinced that the team members themselves provide most of the coaching.

Whether it is named or not, coaching is an important factor in successful team interaction. It provides coordination as well as personal growth to the participants.

在具有不安全感的团队里难以进行自我coaching
The act of coaching simply cannot take place if people don't feel safe. In a suitably competitive atmosphere, you would be crazy to let anyone see you sitting down to be coached; it would be a clear indication that you knew less than your coach about some subject matter.  You would be similarly crazy to coach someone else, as that person may eventually use your assistance to pass you by.

Here are some of the managerial actions that tend to produce teamicidal side effects:
? annual salary or merit reviews
? management by objectives  (MBO)
? praise of certain workers for extraordinary  accomplishment
? awards, prizes, bonuses  tied to  performance
? performance measurement in  almost any  form

Any action that rewards team members differentially is likely to foster competition.

The musical ensemble would have been a happier metaphor for what we are trying to do in well-jelled work groups.

组织学习
Some organizations can learn and some can't. Some can learn a lesson in the abstract but can't change themselves to take advantage of what they have learned.  Some can learn, but the pace of their learning is offset by the pace of their unlearning.

人员流动率
Learning is limited by an organization's ability to keep its people.
When turnover is high, learning is unlikely to stick or can't take place at all. In such an organization, attempts to change skills or to introduce redesigned procedures are an exercise in futility.

浪费员工的时间
The ultimate management sin is wasting people's time.

When you convoke a meeting with n people present, the normal presumption is that all those in the room are there because they need to interact with each other in order to come to certain conclusions.

A real working meeting is called when there is a real reason for all the people invited to think through some matter together.

Meetings are not the only way that people's time gets wasted.
When staff is brought on too quickly at the beginning of a project, there is almost always a waste of people's time.

Projects begin with planning and design, activities that are best carried out by a smallish team.  When design is important (as it is for anything but a simple formula project), it can require as much as half the full project duration.

时间碎片化是隐形的时间浪费。
Fragmenting any knowledge-worker's time over many different tasks assures that he or she will be thrust into two or more different work groups, none of which is likely to  jell into a real team.

Fragmented time is almost certain to be teamicidal, but it also has another insidious effect:  It is guaranteed to waste the individual's time. A worker with multiple assignments will spend a significant part of each day switching gears. This time is largely invisible.

Fragmentation is particularly injurious when two of the tasks involve qualitatively different kinds of work habits.