Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
March/April 2004

Book Review: The Deadline

by Richard Mateosian
Senior Member, Berkeley Chapter

The Deadline: A Novel about Project Management by Tom DeMarco (Dorset House, New York NY, 1997, 320pp, ISBN 0-932633-39-0, $24.95)

In 1964 I knew assembly language for the IBM 650, and I had recently learned Fortran II. I sat down with the IBM COBOL manuals to see what that language was all about. It took me very little time to decide that it was not a language I wanted to program in. I don’t regret this decision, but it shut me out of the world in which Tom DeMarco was later to flourish.

Fifteen years and many languages later, I wound up (briefly) advising a large California bank, and the book that bridged the gap between my way of thinking and theirs was Tom DeMarco’s Structured Analysis and System Specification (Prentice Hall, 1979). I still remember how exciting it was to use DeMarco’s methods to produce diagrams that represented the elements of the bank’s proposed application.

In 1979, DeMarco was insightful. Today he is wise. Then he was concerned with how software modules work together. Today he focuses on how people work together. His book is fiction, but it teaches many real lessons about project management and team building.

Here is the essence of the plot. Mr. Tompkins, a middle-aged middle manager, is laid off from a thinly disguised AT&T, kidnapped by a beautiful and resourceful industrial spy, and spirited away to Moravia, a post-Communist third world country somewhere on the Adriatic coast. A thinly disguised Bill Gates has acquired this country secretly in a stock swap and has decided to help it dominate the shrink-wrap software business by producing knockoffs of Quicken, PhotoShop, Quark XPress, PageMill, Painter, and Lotus Notes, and giving them away.

Tompkins takes the job of managing this development. Because Moravia has far more programmers than required to develop these six products, Tompkins sets up three parallel projects for each product, turning the whole operation into a project management laboratory. He gets carte blanche from Bill, and everything seems to be going smoothly.

Just as Tompkins is beginning to feel complacent, Bill returns to the States to work on his house, leaving the sinister bean counter Allair Belok in charge. Belok embodies every stupid, unscrupulous, bullying executive you’ve ever worked for. Sadly, his tactics seem true to life.

They certainly rang a few bells for me. Tompkins must face arbitrarily shortened schedules, merging of his parallel projects, and forced overtime. On top of this, he must contend with the well-meaning purveyors of process improvement, whom Belok sics on him with even more unreasonable goals.

Tompkins is not alone in his struggles, however. Belinda Binda, the world’s greatest project manager, burnt out and now a bag lady, agrees to help Tompkins staff his projects. So does ex-General Markov, former head of software development for the Moravian army. Lahksa, the beautiful resourceful spy, runs around the world sending Tompkins consultants for brief visits. The reclusive Aristotle Keneros, Moravia’s first programmer, helps to divert the process improvement folks, and teaches Tompkins the importance of debugging the decomposition and interfaces during the design phase.

That’s it for the plot. DeMarco’s chapters are little vignettes of project management. A problem arises, a consultant shows up to help solve the problem, and Tompkins adds a few aphorisms to his journal. According to DeMarco, most of these aphorisms come from his own journal and represent lessons he learned the hard way.

Here are a few of the aphorisms that I especially like:

• Four Essentials of Good Management

  — Get the right people.
  — Match them to the right jobs.
  — Keep them motivated.
  — Help their teams to jell and stay jelled.
  (All the rest is administrivia.)

• There are infinitely many ways to lose a day . . . but not even one way to get one back.
• People under pressure don’t think any faster.
• It’s not what you don’t know that kills you . . . it’s what you know that isn’t so.

I’ve discussed the more general aspects of DeMarco’s book here, but parts of it get pretty technical—though rarely enough to bog down the story.

DeMarco believes in metrics and modeling as project management tools, and several of his vignettes show surprising ways to use those tools.

At the end of the book, Tompkins gives away his journal, saying “I can never imagine opening it again. I don’t need to. I carry those hundred and one principles everywhere I go. They’re carved into my hide.” The book is a crash course in project management and team building. If you do any sort of technical development, you should read it and absorb it.

This review originally appeared in slightly different form in the May/June 2000 issue of IEEE Micro.
© Copyright 2000 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. All rights reserved.

DMV Home | EBSTC | STC | Contact Us

Helping Make Projects Work | Documentation Management for Dummies | Well Planned is Half Done
Ask Elaine | First Impressions: Resume Tips