Watching the battle through binoculars: A Review of 'The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management' by Tom DeMarco

The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management by Tom DeMarco published by Dorset House Publishing, New York, 308 pp

Webster Tompkins, the hero of the novel, walks out of a corporate management course conducted by Edgar Kalbfuss, a twenty-five year old, for an audience that had spent half their lives in managing projects. It is a weeklong course that has all sorts of topics such as GANNT charts, PERT charts, status reporting, progress tracking, project milestone reporting, quality program etc but nothing on people management in the agenda. Tompkins tells Kalbfuss that management is all about getting the right people. For many of us, who have been victims of Kalbfusses, The Deadline touches upon the most salient aspects of project management.

Lahksa Hoolihan, working for Morovian KVJ, the secret service agency of Morovia, has heard the exchange of words between Tompkins and Kalbfuss and she is out to get the right people. She meets the ‘downsized’ Tompkins in the HR session in his Telecommunications company in New Jersey. The description of the HR session for ReSOE (Released to Seek Opportunity Elsewhere) is easily one of the most witty pieces of the novel: ‘This five-week program, according to the posted notice, was to be more than 100 hours of inspirational training, skits, musical interludes, and celebration of ReSOE status. The still-employed Human Resources people who put on the various sessions seemed pretty convinced that ReSOE was a blessing in disguise. They made it clear that they would have dearly loved to be ReSOEs themselves. They really would. But no such luck. No sir, they would just have to soldier on, bearing the burdens of salary and benefits as best as they could. Up on the stage now, they were trying to put on a brave front.’

Kidnapped by Lahksa to head Morovia’s software factory that has been set up by Morovia’s NNL (Nation’s Noble Leader) with the goal of being world leader in shrink-wrapped software, Tompkins divides the 1500 senior software engineers in Morovia’s ‘Silikon Valejit’ into eighteen teams–three for each of the software products (on the lines of Notes, PageMill, Painter, Photoshop, QuarkXpress and Quicken). Tompkins has the luxury of performing a controlled experiment in management. He sets up the three teams for each product with various sizes and differing degrees of pressure. Each chapter of the novel closes with journal entries that he jots down based on his inferences.

Central to The Deadline is the idea that management has turned into cerebral science and there is a need to have a relook at it. For Belinda Binda in the novel, the manager has to trust her gut, lead from the heart, build soul into the team & organization and develop a nose for bullshit. The novel shows that when managers are aggressive, apply pressure and make direct threats, it only causes damage. Allair Belok, Minister of Interior & Deputy Tyrant and villain of the piece, is such a one. By associating heart with a female and lack of it with a male, the author drives home his point. Belok imposes an impossible deadline on the projects. And then he asks the Morovian Software Engineering Institute to audit the projects to see that they attain CMM level 3 by the end of the year. It is the toughest situation any project can face.

The episode concerning the audit team’s objection to one of the Quicken project teams not writing the requirements specification will sound familiar to many of us. As Quicken is a well-documented commercial product, the team could get all the documentation from that product. The audit group manager wouldn’t agree that the requirement spec is not needed and reiterates that the team has abandoned the Repeatable process. Interestingly the B and C teams which had much less man power than the A team are the ones which see the opportunity for not writing the requirements spec and take it. The A teams find the translating of requirements from one form to another not useful but it helps to keep all the overstaffed teams busy. The director of Morovian SEI bails out Tompkins and asks the teams to carry out just one improvement: Last Minute implementation. This ‘scheme involved deferring coding as long as possible, spending the middle forty per cent or more of the project doing an exaggeratedly detailed low-level design, one that would have perfect mappings to the eventual code. It was this time spent on design that was supposed to result in a much-reduced need for debugging.’ How far removed is real life from fiction!

The novel’s stance towards process improvement programs like CMM is critical. To be fair to Tom DeMarco he does say that good process and continually improving process are admirable as well as natural goals. What he points out is that formal process improvement programs cost time and money. A project can hope to gain enough from a single well-chosen method improvement (such as Last Minute implementation) to repay the time and money invested in the change. Multi-skill improvement programs, such as increasing an entire CMM level, are most likely to make projects finish later than they would have without the program. This is a highly debatable topic.

There are useful episodes on conflict resolution, project sociology, risk management, modeling & simulation of the development process, estimation using function points etc. Lahksa drops some powder in Belok’s drink to make him contract Herpes and then packs him off for a year to undergo treatment in a clinic in Atlanta. His absence helps Tompkins to work in peace. The B and C teams complete the projects successfully. As Belinda says, this is the way the ends of projects are supposed to be, but almost never are. Tompkins can pick up his binoculars and watch how it all turns out just like George C Scott does after passing the intelligence to his subordinates and quietly watching the battle in the movie Patton. NNL takes Morovia to the year’s hottest IPO. Tompkins makes a killing from his stock options but his plans for quite retirement are thwarted by Lahksa. In the end he finds her offer most welcome.

As a novel, The Deadline may have flaws: It deals with types and lacks in complexity. Project problems are solved rather too easily. But then the novel has been written to illustrate the author’s ideas on project management which will help one learn how to transfer the intelligence to the team, pick up one’s binoculars, quietly watch the action and intervene only if something goes awry just as in Patton.
-2001