Deadline reflection ch 3-5

“I am sick to death of being given impossible schedules” says Mr. T. in this third chapter of the book. He wakes up in this house and starts the new adventure with many questions, but lots of confidence. Even though Lahksa starts telling him that he is already late and needs to catch up, Tompkins knows that is not his fault and that the schedule must be wrong since the beginning. This kind of answer makes Tompkins sound very professional but at the same time not in the mood to be talked like that.

The main objective of his new job is to mold all the talent of the laboratory and the good training of the developers to make a world-class software industry. When he receives all this information, he already knows what he needs to be successful. Or at least it seems like that for the moment. He starts asking for support, personal assistants, and some consultants for the job. Something that got my attention is that he asks for up-to-date workstations and network savvy support staff. These kinds of requisites and petitions to start working gives a more in-depth perspective of how good and prepare Mr. T. is for the job.

The third chapter ends by Tompkins realizing that he has a huge laboratory to play with and experiment in the administrative and project management way. He gets excited and for me the tools that were given to him are more than enough to run these tests with.

The fourth chapter is the one that makes a lot of statements and big important points of consideration in project management. It all starts with Lahksa who gives Mr. T. like an agenda to take notes of what he is learning and will learn throughout the process and job. This agenda has already something written in it. The four essentials of good management.

This note is like a resume of what is learned in the first two chapters of the book. From this list, my main points and most important are that one needs to ger the right people and to keep them motivated. We know that dealing with people is the most difficult task about project management and that it is the most important. These four essentials mean a lot to me because is a new way of discovering a structure of planning when creating a new project in life.

The other big topic in this fourth chapter is the safety and change note that Tompkins make after the discussion with Waldo. From this one can learn that people can’t embrace change unless they feel safe. This example is presented in the discussion as well as the idea of change as the essential to all success in project work. These two points in the safety and change list made me think that change is really a big factor of project management because of the new problems that can get in the way, but also because of the big advantages of discovering a way of doing things better, or to make them faster.

The fifth chapter got me interested since the beginning, Mr. T. getting to know NNL is like a duel of good thinking man. Both sides know something key and sharing them makes the room full of good knowledge. NNL, who wants to use the strategy of giving away the product and still make money, is going to use one of the techniques that software applications nowadays do to make money. This technique requires the user to test the software and start depending on it, with that, when a money wall is created, it will be 100 times more convinced of buying the product. I am not sure if that is going to be the case, but it is interesting to try to find out how are they going to do it.

The last main observation in this chapter is about the fear of NNL that gives to others in order to hear a “Yes” for answer. In that part of the chapter I learned that threats are an imperfect way to motivate performance. This means that even if one intimidates the other to give like a fake boost to work harder, it will eventually be the same at some point, so that is not the strategy to do.