Miguel's Blog

Final Reflection

This is the final reflection for the course. This will first cover the topics that the last third of the book covered and then I’m talking about what I learned from the book as a whole. One of the first topics covered in the last part of the book is that some projects often skip the design process. Well, design will be done, but when implementation comes around, the programmers will just not look at the design and design as they code, which can lead to a high number of bugs. It’s also discussed that sometimes it’s better to just do design for a long time, try to get the best design possible and that design should be easily transferable to code. Then you can do last minute implementation and end up with few to no bugs. The problem with this in the context of the book is that the teams were overstaffed and design is a process which will not be sped up by adding more people, it might even slow down. When coding, more people can often reduce time. A dynamic team size throughout the project’s lifespan is the best way of doing it. Personally I think this is true, design is difficult to do with a lot of people, you have to communicate with many others when doing something that the time that you actually spend doing design decreases.

Another topic that is covered by the book is the size of meetings and the way meetings should be carried out. A meeting agenda must be defined beforehand. Not all meetings are relevant for all people, so having someone in a meeting that serves no purpose to them is only wasting their time. It’s also mentioned that there are some steps to take when starting a meeting. This includes making someone leave the meeting. This someone must be the person whose time you value the most. I agree with all of these, the main point of this is not wasting people’s time, you want them to be working if there’s no purpose in them being in the meeting. Also, the best thing in the book happens during this part, Belok is out, he isn’t coming back. Lahksa gave him herpes (through his drink). Everything is going well at that point.

After that, everything seems to be coming together. All the projects are finished and NNL came back. Tompkins had no intention of staying in Morovia and was leaving with his new fortune. Belok made one last appearance, but thankfully Tompkins handled it. Finally, the book ends with Tompkins going to Latvia and becoming its NNL along with Lahksa. They will be married in the future and the book ends.

Overall, the book was a lot more interesting than I initially thought it would be. I thought it was going to be like a textbook about management, but that wasn’t the case. It had a good mix of characters and story along with lessons about what management is. It was informative while never being too boring. Some of the main ideas that stick out to me is that management is about people and not about numbers and reading emails, more people isn’t equal to more work being done, and being less strict will actually increase productivity. I think this course along with this book gave me a good understanding of what management really is and the different ways to be a good manager.

Now I’m going to talk a bit about my thoughts on the whole COVID-19 situation. The world is very hectic right now due to the virus. The virus will most definitely have a permanent impact on the world. The post-covid world will be very different from the world pre-covid. The most obvious change is the work from home mentality. I think a lot of companies will change their opinion on the topic after the pandemic is over. They now know that working from home is effective and works. This can lead to companies either becoming fully work from home or a hybrid model. This can have a huge impact on the way teams are managed. Working from home just screams flexibility so managers will have to learn to be more flexible. The most prominent example is in more flexible working hours, this doesn’t necessarily mean working less hours, but you can divide the hours as you see fit, maybe you work more efficiently at night and this model can let you work at night. All in all, there are lots of things to adapt to, especially for managers.

Overall, this was a useful course. Management is something that many of us will probably have to deal with later in life. Even if you want to code, eventually you will want to move up to a management position, this is why this course can be so helpful. This course teaches you that management isn’t as clear-cut as just reading emails or punching in numbers in a calculator. Management is about people primarily and this course did a good job at teaching that.

Deadline, Chapter 23

The last chapter arrives. There’s a huge party in Morovia and it’s Tompkins’ last day in the country. Due to all the food and drinks Tompkins had a dream with Yordini the fortune teller. Yordini told Tompkins that he could tell Tompkins the future. Tompkisn asked away about the future of many things. The airport project for the Olympics was going to be finished by the deadline, although not perfectly and with some complications. As for Belinda, she will be a senator from the state of California. And finally, Belok, he will be many things: investment banker, captain of industry, special assistant in the White House, he will be at the Federal Prison at Danbury and, lastly, have his own radio talk show.

Tompkins was then interviewed by one of the ex-General’s managers, Alonzo. Alonzo asked Tompkisn about everything he did right and everything he did wrong during the whole time he was in Morovia, to which Tompkins answered by giving Alonzo his journal that he has been writing since day one. That journal had everything he had learned and would be a great help to managers around the world. Tompkins didn’t need it anymore, he had those teaching engraved in him and he wasn’t forgetting them any time soon.

And lastly, Tompkins was leaving Morovia, he didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to Lahksa. The plane is supposed to be heading to Boston while making a stop in Latvia prior to that. When he landed, he thought Latvia didn’t look like what he expected. He asked the taxi driver of the taxi he was in, and just as he suspected, he wasn’t in Latvia, he was in Bulgaria. He also learned that Bulgaria ha it’s own NNL, which he expected since Morovia’ NNL had told him that Latvia had already been bought. He finally arrived at a palace.

Tompkins was surprised to see Lahksa there. But what was even more surprising was that Lahksa wasn’t the NNL, Tompkins was. Turns out that Tompkins had a lot more money than he initially thought. This was because Tompkins had options. Options are a sort of compensation companies give to their employees. Options aren’t stock directly, but give the employee the option to buy the company’s stock.

We get a happy ending. Tompkins is now Latvia’s NNL and Lahksa will be the Co-NNL. And, to finish the whole book, Tompkins asked Lahksa to be her wife, which she accepted. I expected this to happen, but I still find it weird that it happened. I feel like Tompkins didn’t spend that much time with Lahksa. She just drugged him at the beginning, then spent a bit of time with him and then disappeared for more than half of the book. But I guess it’s a fine way to finish this story.

“He lifted her into his arms and carried her across the threshold.”

Deadline, Chapter 22

It’s ending at last, the projects are finishing one after the other, it won’t be long before all 6 of them are finished. What’s even better is that some of them finished before the unfair deadline that Belok had set up. NNL finally came back and called Tompkins to his office. NNL told him that Morovia was going public, the IPO was going to be held next week. An IPO means offering shares of a private company to the public, the company goes from private to public, this allows public investors to participate. Along with that, Tompkins gets a generous sum of money plus some extra for him to give to others. NNLwanted Tompkins to stay in Morovia since he did a great job, but Tompkins just wanted to go somewhere and spend his new fortune. Instead, Tompkins decided that Melissa Alber should take his place. Tompkins wasn’t the only one leaving, NNL wanted to go and buy out some other country. NNL intended for Belok to replace him, but since he was sick due to “mysterious reasons”, Tompkins suggested putting Gabriel Markov. These two were perfect for their new roles.

Everything was going perfectly until Tompkins received a call from Belok. Belok was making some insane requests, he wanted 4 buildings to be unoccupied for some tenants. Not only that, Belok wanted the employees to be squished into the remaining buildings and they were not able to bring their equipment. Belok called the “lean and mean”, this meant layoffs, salary cuts, smaller workspaces, etc. Tompkins, however, said that what they needed was “prosperous and caring”. Belok was quite angry, but Tompkins was having none of it. What the experiment showed was that being strict was not the way to go, employees needed a better working environment and loose schedule to work at their best. Tompkins just ended the call with a legendary line.

“Allair, if I am such a pushover and you are such a dangerous fellow, how come I am sitting here on top of the world and you’re stuck in a clinic in Georgia with blisters on your pecker?”

Deadline, Chapters 20 and 21

Finally, some good news comes in chapter 20. Tompkins receives a letter from Lahksa telling that a consultant was going to visit him and that everything was going to be okay.

“And don’t worry about you, either. I’ll take care of everything as soon as I get back.”

It’s still a mystery what she means by this, but I can assume she has a plan in order for the projects to finish in time or for the deadline to be moved.

Tompkins meets with the consultant right away. The consultant is named Harry Winnipeg and he has written many books, so many that he has forgotten about many of them. Harry can tell right away that Tompkins has problems and that those problems are related to people. Harry decides to deal with the angry manager and ends up demoting him. Harry also mentions that PMill-A is already dead and there’s no reason to continue working on it. However, Tompkins needed to keep it alive because of politics. This is actually called a zombie project and Harry says that at least 10% projects fall in this category. I think it would be weird working on one of those, you basically have no chance of completing it.

Harry also says that meetings shouldn’t have too many people in them. Most likely than not, the whole meeting won’t be necessary for everyone to hear. He suggests dividing the meetings into smaller ones and creating an agenda with all the meetings and what they are about so you only go if you have to. He also mentioned the need for a ceremony with 5 steps. With the ceremony you choose someone and just make him leave, this someone has to be the person that will make the best use of that time.

Harry talks again with Tompkins about the angry manager. The manager actually wanted to leave his position. It turns out that the manager was in fear, however, fear is an unacceptable feeling inside the workplace, so he replaced it with anger. It’s good to know this so when you see someone angry you know that they are afraid. This manager will be a configuration manager. This is a term that I hadn’t heard of before. Configuration management means ensuring that all software and hardware assets are tracked in a project as well as changes to them.

Finally, everything that I was waiting for happened. Lahksa came back, and not only that, but Belok is out of the picture. Lahksa just gave Belok herpes through his drink. I’m kind of glad that he is gone for now, but I feel that Lahksa went a bit overboard. Tompkins finally has freedom to do whatever he wants. HE plans on raiding the A teams and giving those people to the B and C teams. He felt like Patton. He was just observing the battle, all his work was already done beforehand. However, if something went wrong he had to interfere.

Even with Belok gone, Tompkins still wanted to finish the projects before the deadline that Belok had set up. He suggested cutting out code inspection. The projects were coming along pretty well, so code inspections generally didn’t detect anything wrong with the code. That precisely the reason why Tompkins decided to remove them, if they weren’t doing anything, why have them? Since they did design so well, most of the bugs weren’t even there in the first place. Cutting inspection would save lots of man hours and will make the projects finish sooner. The only bad thing was that since Tompkins wasn’t doing that much anymore, he felt like he wasn’t learning as much as before. He concluded that sometimes you just have to hope for a miracle, but don’t rely on that.

Deadline, Chapter 19

This chapter kicks off with Tompkins talking with Kenoros. Kenoros told him that he had graded the design of every team, the quality of the design didn’t matter to him, what mattered was that there was a design at all. All A teams had an awful score. The reason was that these teams were overstaffed and design was not suited to a large group. Design was better done with a team of 5 or 6 people. When you have 20 or more people, you can’t just have do nothing, so the teams jumped straight to coding. With such a tight deadline, the teams needed to do a last minute implementation without bugs, but with no design that was going to be difficult. Skipping design can lead to some big consequences like the project deviating from its goal or reaching the goal in a non-convenient way.

You can try and divide a project when doing design, but most of the time that results in no design being done. Dividing a project at design time will result in a lot of interfaces between people which in return increase meeting times, interdependence and frustration.

Later, a manager from a smaller team came requesting more people to work under her. This was unexpected at first, since the reason why the team was doing so ewell was because of the small team size. However, they were mostly done with the design and when the implementation part came along, there would actually be work to do for 35 more people. Turns out that the optimal team size varies throughout the project’s lifespan.

“When the detailed, low-level modular design is done, opportunities for splitting up the work explode.”

Projects started with an aggressive deadline tend to take longer than those started with a reasonable deadline. Even if the deadline is set on a later date, the project will probably finish first.

Partial Reflection 2

For this second partial, we finally get into the main thing I had been waiting for, the actual experiment starts. There were some unexpected conditions by Belok, but thankfully everything worked out at the end. The first problem Tompkins and his group faces is that Belok wants everyone to be on the same team. Overstaffed teams are a bad idea when it comes to software development, 2 people won’t write twice the lines of code than just one. As you start adding more people to the project you start seeing diminishing returns until you actually start losing productivity and money by adding more people. With more people conflicts will form more easily and in some cases there might not be enough work for everyone so you are paying people to do nothing and just wait until there is work for them.

The book also talks about function points, which are a way of measuring projects. However, Tompkins and his team realized that they didn’t really need function points, they could just have come up with an arbitrary unit of measurement that worked for their projects specifically. After that, we revisit the problem that you can’t increase productivity in the short term. Tompkins is demanded to follow the Capability Maturity Model which will only increase productivity in the long term and will actually increase the time it will take for the 6 projects to finish. We also learn about other ways that programs like CMM can be detrimental. For example, CMM sets such a strict set of rules that you are not allowed to stray from the path, even if you find a faster solution. In this case, since the 6 projects are copies of other projects, the managers wanted to use the documentation that was already done before and have a huge head start that way. The B and C teams had already started doing just that and had a huge lead in that regard. Sometimes, having strict rules can lead to not doing thighs that are against them, but offer benefits.

Tompkins meets with Morovia’s first programmer and he tells Tompkins that the only feasible way they are finishing the projects is by reducing debugging time. Developers spend most of their time debugging, so by increasing design time drastically bugs will be almost non-existent.

Following that, Belok delivers more bad news. Everytime this character makes an appearance he just screws everything even more. So it turns out that Tompkins now has to get the airport ready for the 2000 Olympics. Work just keeps piling up. Belok also insisted that Tompkins had to be a lot stricter with the workers. Putting a lot of pressure on people will actually reduce performance. Moreover, increasing work hours doesn’t actually increase work done. All the orders Belok was giving Tompkins were going to decrease the performance. Thankfully, with the help of the higher ups, he can lie to Belok so he thinks that he is following his orders while he is actually doing quite the opposite.

The next topic the book covers has to do with project specifications. Many parties are involved in a project, which will inevitably lead to conflict. Due to this, specs are often ambiguous in order to not go against the parties involved. The fact that the existing radio system specs weren’t clear lead to another thing that I found to be very much true. People tend to think they are less intelligent than others, so when reading a complicated spec, you pretend you understand it because you assume everyone else understood it.

For the last part of this partial, the book talked about conflict resolution. In this case, 2 people helped Tompkins with this, One was Dr. Larry and the other was the kindergarten teacher, Kayo. Larry thought Tompkins that conflict isn’t unprofessional, as long as 2 parties with different interests are present conflict will arise. In this case, a mediator needs to show them that their interests align, although not completely. Kayo tells a lot of stories that some way or another relate to the project and end up increasing morale and people don’t want to leave anymore. In the last part, the interlude, I learnt that sometimes focusing too much on something will blind you from what you are looking for if the description is slightly off.

I’m almost done with the book. What I’m expecting to happen next is the obvious conclusion to the experiment. I personally think that the projects will not be finished in time, but they aren’t going to be in trouble. I feel like there needs to be some sort of plot twist or twist with Belok where it turns out that he was just being super strict to test him or something like that. I just can’t believe that he doesn’t realize that his ideas are not doing any good. I guess I will find that out later.

Deadline, Chapters 17, 18 and Interlude

Chapter 17 begins with Topmkins realizing that they need a way to solve conflict. I think this is obvious considering all the conflict that we have had in previous chapters, especially the Belok conflict. Conflict is everywhere at this point of the story. System development organizations in particular tend to have poor conflict resolution skills. They desperately need someone to help them with conflict resolution and Gabriel comes up with someone, he is a kindergarten teacher. The teacher is good at solving conflict since he has to deal with kids constantly, but it comes natural to him, he can’t really teach it. Because of this, he is going to help with the PMill-A project. Finally, Aristotle speaks up about Dr. Larry Boheme, this man can teach them about conflict solving so Tompkins goes to meet him.

Larry teaches Tompkins a lot about conflict resolution. He mentions how conflict will arise as long as there are 2 different parties involved in a project. These conflicts arise because of different interests, but just because they are different doesn’t mean that one of them is wrong. Both parties have their reasons so this is why you should approach conflict with respect instead of trying to suppress it. Conflict isn’t unprofessional and everyone’s conditions must be respected.

“Negotiation is hard; mediation is easy.”

That phrase means that when negotiating, if you want to win the other needs to lose in return. This is not the correct way to solve it. Instead, a mediator that is a neutral party can help by showing them that their interests may align more than they think. They may not align 100%, but maybe 80% or 90% of the interests line up and a better solution can be reached.

The next chapter focuses more on the kindergarten teacher Maestro Diyenira, but I’ll call him Kayo. We learn that Kayo just talks and talks, he tells stories. The stories tend to have some sort of relevance to the project, but Kayo isn’t really making them about the project on propose. Lunch takes 2 hours with his stories, but it turns out that the time lost may actually be beneficial. I find it funny how Kayo’s talks lose time, but keep people in the project and end up increasing the work done.

Tompkins has a call with Allair and it’s just bad news. Finally, it seemed like the projects may be done in time, but Allair just decided to move the deadline one month sooner. Allair also demanded that workers work all 7 days of the week. This is, again, the opposite of what needs to be done. Less work days can sometimes lead to more productivity. In this example, a 4 day work week increased productivity by 40%. However, there is a lower limit, working 1 day a week won’t suddenly increase productivity. Another, often overlooked benefit is the savings that came in the form of less pages printed and less electricity used.

Tompkins and Kayo talk about solving conflict and come to the conclusion that solving a conflict is similar to a mother taking care of a child that skinned his knee. You need a kiss and then distract him from the pain. In this case, the kiss is getting consent from both people to let you mediate them. It’s also better if you are not in a position of power in relation to them. Conflict solving skills can even be learned in 10 minutes.

As for the interlude, Belinda decides they should keep lying to Belok since he hasn’t been particularly helpful. They decide to take a 3 day weekend while telling Belok they work 24 hours a day 7 days a week. During the weekend, Tompkins decides to go stay at a place that Kayo talked about frequently in stories. Getting there he missed a sign. Turns out that if you focus too much on what you know, you won’t notice other things. In this case, the description of the sign was slightly wrong so he was completely blind to it because of the small difference.

Deadline, Chapter 16

Tompkins is now struggling with the air traffic control project in addition to the original 6 projects. Tompkins is relieved when some specs for existing radio systems are given to them hoping that they will aid in the making of their own radio system. Even as more work keeps piling up they stay positive and aim to do all of it.

“”We take on too much,” the voice said, “because we are terrified of too little.””

Meanwhile, Tompkins is informed that a manager for the PMill A team has been very strict lately. He goes to check on him. There, he meets with the product manager. Tompkins finds out that the reason why the manager is angry is probably because of the way Belok acts. Belok must have a reason for being this way, he isn’t doing any good by giving orders. Anyways, this goes to show how an aggressive boss can lead to an aggressive manager. The anger flows through the hierarchy. Also, while reading this part I came across the terms project manager and product manager, these are terms that I had heard before and I knew were different but I never gave it much thought. I looked into it and found that a product manager does things like talking to customers to find their insights and setting business objectives, while a project manager does resource planning and risk management.

Tompkins decides to read the radio system spec sheet and doesn’t really understand anything. He talks about it to the others, but he kind of pretends that he knows what it’s talking about, he just needs more time to read it. Belinda makes him admit that he didn’t understand a thing. They come to a conclusion that the spec doesn’t really specify, which is its main purpose. The spec is very ambiguous, which makes Tompkins think about how did that spec ever get approved or why did other people never question it. People just tend to think that they are less intelligent than others and they have to make up for it with hard work. They never admit that they don’t understand it, instead they think everyone else understands it and think they have to work harder in order to understand it.

Another question puzzled Tompkins which was why was something like that spec ever approved in the first place. A spec has a list of input and a list of output and a way to transform the input to the output. Sometimes, the transformation part, which is the most important part, isn’t even explained. Belinda’s explanation for this was that when making a spec, especially one of the scale of the radio system, many parties are involved. These different parties all have different wants and needs, the people making the spec don’t really want to choose a side and end up writing ambiguously. I feel like if this is the case, try to make different specs so you can at least specify stuff, which is what you should be doing. If you can’t do that, maybe don’t make the spec in the first place and use that time for something more useful because that spec is surely not going to be useful to others.

Deadline, Chapter 15

This chapter begins with Tompkins meeting with my favourite character, Belok, and by favourite I mean least favourite. He does the usual Belok things and is super strict and assigns Tompkins even more work. He is supposed to help the airport deal with the 2000 olympics, asi if the impossible software projects weren’t enough. He also complains about the workers not doing enough overtime and that Tompkins needed to apply more pressure to the workers. Belok doesn’t have to be such a meanie, he doesn’t realize that his suggestions are not working, in fact they are probably doing exactly the opposite of working.

Tompkins and the team decide to analyze the effects of pressure on the time to deliver a project, they even used old projects with the help of Waldo. Belok’s model was that as you put more pressure you reduce the time to deliver. Before Waldo arrived, Belinda drew her own model of what she expected. The model told them that a bit of pressure will reduce the time to deliver, but more than that and the time to deliver would actually increase. They mention that short bursts of pressure can work really well, while long-term pressure doesn’t which aligns with what I found online. Small amounts of pressure can increase your momentum, but with more pressure the momentum is reduced, employees are immobilized by the stress and can have fear of taking one wrong step, which leads to no steps being taken at all.

[Image source]

When Waldo came back with the results it choked everyone that pressure will only lead at most to a 6% productivity increase. This is small compared with the 25% that Belinda had speculated. An even more surprising fact that they found was overtime hours do not decrease the time to deliver. In fact, more overtime hours can lead to a longer time to deliver. More work hours doesn’t result in more work being done. A study showed that managers couldn’t tell the difference between someone who worked 80 hours a week and someone who didn’t. The work done was comparable. What this chapter tells us is that pressure and overtime will only lead to stressed workers, which will result in less productivity.

Deadline, Chapters 13 and 14

Tompkins finally got the results of the workers productivity and it wasn’t looking too bright. The PShop project needed at least 3 years to finish, but they had a little less than a year left. Then, hsi new assistant informed him that an audit was going to be performed on the project groups. Tompkins was told that every team needs to be in Capability Maturity Model level 3. This concept had already been mentioned in a previous chapter. It basically means to assign a level to the capability of a team for producing software. The higher the level the better.

There is a big problem, however, with the way Minister Belok wants things to be done. He wants the teams to undergo training in order to boost their productivity. However, we have already seen in a previous chapter that it isn’t possible to gain productivity in the short term. They may gain productivity in the futurem, but in the context of the current 6 projects the productivity increase will probably delay them since increasing the productivity will take time. The benefits will probably not show until after the deadline passes. And the worst part is that the whole organization is going to go through these changes, not only the 6 projects. This means that they will discover the secret teams B and C that are hidden away. Thankfully, Tompkins has some days before they are discovered.

There is a problem, one of the teams is not going to the process exactly as specified. Since they are copying products, they are using the requirements for the product they are copying. This will actually save time, but they are going against the level 2 requirements. In this case, I think he should be allowed to break the mold. If you always have to follow the same steps, you won’t find a faster way of doing things. Don’t stick to the mold if the situation calls for it.

And actually, the B and C teams are doing exactly that, they are using already existing requirements and are speeding their development. The reason why A teams aren;t doing this, except for one, is because with such large teams you must make all of the members work at all times, if they copied, they wouldn’t all be working.

In the next chapter, Tompkins decides to convince the director not to make the teams follow such strict rules. He is told by the ex-general that he has to like the director even if he doesn’t want to. People follow Tompkins because Tompkins likes them. He goes with the director, but he isn’t able to grant Tompkins’ wishes. Tompkins instead goes with the superior of the director.

He meets Morovia’s first programmer. He has a lot of experience. He decides to help Tompkins lie to Belok if he gets a job. His job will be getting the teams to do less debugging. Debugging costs a lot of time for developers. He suggests spending a lot more time designing and less time coding. The design will be so close to code that when the time to code comes, it will be fast and bug-free. He also mentions that many people design because they have to and once they start coding they don’t even look at the design and design at the same time as coding. This generates lots of bugs and I have to admit that I have been guilty of this in the past. With this approach the projects may just be possible to complete before the deadline.