In this post, I want to try writing the summary of Peopleware in English. Actually, I’m not good in English, but this book that I’ve read is in English edition. You know, sometime it’s hard to substitute word to Indonesian. It can make ambiguity in statements I write. So, I avoid that.
Simply, this book talks about Project Management. Actually, I’ve still been reading this book, so I can’t tell you yet the content of this book completely. And if you want to know why I read this book , it was a punishment from my lecturer for faking presence list I did. :d
Okay, let’s start
Chapter 1 : SOMEWHERE TODAY, A PROJECT IS FAILING
We know, most of managers are prone to one particular failing. Since the days when computers first came into common use, there must have been tens of thousands of accounts receivable programs written. There are probably a dozen or more accounts receivable projects underway as you read these words. And somewhere today, one of them is failing.
Each year since 1977, conducted survey of development projects, their result 15% all projects studied came to naught. They were canceled or aborted or “postponed” or they delivered products that were never used. For bigger projects, the odds are even worse. Fully twenty-five percent of projects that lasted twenty-five work-years or more failed to complete. These failed data points was discarded, they analyzed the others. Since 1979, though, they’ve been contacting whoever is left of the project staff to find out what went wrong. For the overwhelming majority of the bankrupt projects they studied, there was not a single technological issue to explain the failure.
So what make them to be failed? The book says…
1. The Name of the Game
The cause of failure most frequently cited by their survey participants was “politics”. It constitute the project’s sociology. The truly political problems are a tiny and pathological subset.
The major problems of our work are not so much
technological as sociological in nature.
Most managers are willing to concede the idea that they’ve got
more people worries than technical worries. But they seldom manage that way. That was the problem. They manage as though technology were their principal concern.
Part of this phenomenon is due to the upbringing of the average
manager. He or she was schooled in how the job is done, not
how the job is managed.
People-related problems will cause you trouble on your next assignment than all the design, implementation, and methodology issues you’ll have to deal with.
2. The High-Tech Illusion
We use computers and other new technology components to develop our products or to organize our affairs. But we forget, we go about this work in teams and projects and other tightly knit working groups, we are mostly in the human communication business. Our successes stem from good human interactions by all participants in the
effort, and our failures stem from poor human interactions.
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. If you find yourself concentrating on the technology rather than the sociology, you’re like the vaudeville character who loses his keys on a dark street and looks for them on the adjacent street because, as he explains, “The light is better there” .
Conclusion: Almost all project failures are due to sociological problems, yet managers spend most of their time on technological issues because those are the issues they were trained to handle.
(to be continued)
The Brainstormer 
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