Tom DeMarco Quotes

Tom DeMarco delivers blunt, practical insights, perfect for those seeking clear guidance on quality and work.

16 quotes

1. You can't control what you can't measure

2. Quality is free, but only to those who are willing to pay heavily for it.

3. People under pressure don't work better; they just work faster.

4. The manager's function is not to make people work, but to make it possible for people to work.

5. The more you focus on control, the more likely you're working on a project that's striving to deliver something of relatively minor value.

6. Product quality has almost nothing to do with defects or their lack.

7. Training is practice doing a new task much more slowly than an expert would do it.

8. 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."

9. Computer system analysis is like child-rearing; you can do grievous damage, but you cannot ensure success.

10. The pathology of setting a deadline to the earliest articulable date essentially guarantees that the schedule will be missed.

11. The purpose of a team is not goal attainment but goal alignment.

12. The manager's function is not to make people work, it is to make it possible for people to work.

13. Organizational busy work tends to expand to fill the working day.

14. First law of Bad Management: If something isn't working, do more of it.

15. Some of the most flowery praise you hear on the subject of teams is only hypocrisy. Managers learn to talk a good game about teams even when they're secretly threatened by the whole concept.

16. If nothing is declared unchangeable, then the organization will resist all change.