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Overview
Death MarchSecond Edition
The #1 guide to surviving "doomed" projects...Fully updated and expanded, with powerful new techniques!
At an alarming rate, companies continue to create death-march projects, repeatedly! What's worse is the amount of rational, intelligent people who sign up for a death-march projectsaeprojects whose schedules, estimations, budgets, and resources are so constrained or skewed that participants can hardly survive, much less succeed. In Death March, Second Edition, Ed Yourdon sheds new light on the reasons why companies spawn Death Marches and provides you with guidance to identify and survive death march projects.
Yourdon covers the entire project lifecycle, systematically addressing every key issue participants face: politics, people, process, project management, and tools. No matter what your role—developer, project leader, line-of-business manager, or CxO—you'll find realistic, usable solutions. This edition's new and updated coverage includes:
- Creating Mission Impossible projects out of DM projects
- Negotiating your project's conditions: making the best of a bad situation
- XP, agile methods, and death march projects
- Time management for teams: eliminating distractions that can derail your project
- "Critical chain scheduling": identifying and eliminating organizational dysfunction
- Predicting the "straw that breaks the camel's back": lessons from system dynamics
- Choosing tools and methodologies most likely to work in your environment
- Project "flight simulators": wargaming your next project
- Applyingtriage to deliver the features that matter most
- When it's time to walk away
This isn't a book about perfectly organized projects in "textbook" companies. It's about your project, in your company. But you won't just recognize your reality: you'll learn exactly what to do about it.
Synopsis
Yourdon, an internationally recognized consultant and author, sheds light on why companies create "death march" software projects--projects whose schedules, estimations, budgets, and resources are so constrained or skewed that the projects are doomed to failure. He explains how to master politics, people, processes, project management, and tools for successful projects. This second edition includes new chapters on estimation, negotiation, and time management, and new discussion of agile concepts. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Booknews
Helps software developers survive projects that are "doomed to fail" and explains how to negotiate the best deal up front, manage people, set priorities, and choose tools and technologies. Walks through the entire project life cycle, showing both managers and developers how to deal with the politics of difficult projects and how to make the most of available resources. Includes chapter summaries, questions and answers between the author and other experts in the field, and a healthy dose of humor. Yourdon is a software developer and author of 25 computer books. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewYou know how software projects are supposed to go. Careful software engineering methodologies. Cooperative clients. Proven technologies. Well-organized teams. Adequate resources. Sane schedules. Well, you can dream. The reality? All too often, projects become “death marches,” where the whole team is fighting merely to survive.
People work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week -- and no amount of Jolt Cola is enough to even the odds. These are the projects where folks struggle to keep their jobs, personal relationships, health, and sanity. Survival, says Ed Yourdon, involves five key issues: politics, people, process, project management, and tools. Yourdon’s Death March, Second Edition shows how to use all five of them to give yourself a fighting chance.
Yourdon knows more about software projects than just about anyone. In a 40-year career, he’s pioneered everything from timesharing to object-oriented methodologies. He’s trained more than a quarter million software analysts and developers. (He’s also been inducted into the Computer Hall of Fame, along with folks like Charles Babbage, Seymour Cray, James Martin, Grace Hopper, Gerald Weinberg, and Bill Gates.)
In this edition, he reflects the massive changes that have taken place since his 1997 First Edition. For instance, there’s extensive new coverage of agile methodologies: how they will -- and won’t -- help the death march project.
There’s also detailed coverage of time management, as well as a new chapter on the “dynamics” of task-related processes. We think you’ll especially like Yourdon’s coverage of “wargaming”: practicing your projects in advance, identifying your most likely obstacles, and preparing for them.
There’s also an entirely new chapter on negotiating the terms of your death march project. Yourdon knows full well that “it’s very easy to predict the outcome of negotiations over budget, schedule, and resources: You lose.” But you can lose less spectacularly: anything you can do to make your project’s conditions more tolerable will be worth the effort.
Yourdon spends an entire chapter on triage: making cold-blooded decisions about which features to sacrifice and focusing your resources on critical features that would “die” without them.
You’ll find excellent advice on getting enough great people (not easy in most places). You’ll learn how to gauge the commitment of your team and encourage it to the greatest extent possible (including a look at how money does and doesn’t motivate). Finally, Yourdon shows how to improve your team’s working conditions even if it means breaking -- no, bulldozing -- the rules.
When it comes to death march projects, there are no magic bullets. But this book is as close as it gets. Bill Camarda
Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks for Dummies, Second Edition.