by Tom DeMarco
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent Book! A quick read with great lessons!, 2006-12-11
Excellent book described in much detail by the other reviewers. I thought about giving it 4 stars since it is a little dated on current CMM status but I think that would have been a disservice.
Thanks Tom DeMarco for another great title. Check out Mr. DeMarco's other titles including Peopleware.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Too sad to be true, 2006-11-10
After working for a software company for more than 7 years , this book is actually of no surprise to me at all. However, those of you who want to know how software projects work in reality, this book is a very good and true reflection of that. We probably all studied Project Management Essentials, but all the projects I have been involved in so far, run more like the one described in this book and not like in the school manual. Enjoy the reality.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
excellent novel cum software project management insights!, 2006-06-19
The setting of the novel are in the fictitious republic of Morovia where our lead character ends up somehow.
The target of the govt of Morovia to have the best software export facility in the world by some time , has indeed parallels in the real world , most notably India and those who want to follow the Indian model like China , Pakistan , etc etc .
Mr.Demarco's acute powers of observations in the real world is more than apparent in his incisive analysis of the personalities that have had varoius roles in the past , as depicted in the setting of the novel. Whether it be that of General Markov and his remarkable administrative capabilities owing to a career span of experience in military origanisations or Binda who is reportedly the world's best project manager or researchers like Abdul Jamid who have studied and developed various models for modelign the hunches of good managers , in all of this Demarco has sort of amalgamated - in my opinion - his deep observations of different people in these roles from the real world based on his experiences and his own opinions on these roles formed through the author's rather distingushed career . This gives us a wonderful insight into the dynamics of these roles , and that too in the setting of a novel which maintains all the while to be an interesting read.
His insistence through the mouthpiece of the lead character of this novel that good management , more than anything else is about people - while overly simplistic - is still , in my opinion , correct in its spirit and core. The same as a matter of fact is true about anything else in real world and life - it is all about people.
Coming back to the book review , I believe Mr.Demarco has done remarkably well in employing this pedagogical device of a novel like like setting to discuss various issues one has to cope with in a high tech software project . This has been done through various characters with different roles who interact with the lead character of the novel : people like superb project manager colleagues , bossy and stupid management, expert consultants , good and bad team members etc .
Any reader who has been in the software industry for a while in any role will be able to relate to a fair subset of these people and the experiences.
The value of this novel is in the various valuable insights coming from different people of the novel setting which invariably have parallels in the real world . It would not have been possible for someone to write this novel unless like Mr.Demarco they have been in the software industry themselves .
I would highly recommend this very readable novel to people from the software industry , as it offers a lot of educating insights even if at times one does not agree to some of the opinions of the characters involved.
11 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
 Could have been summarized in about 5 pages, 2005-10-05
Deadline follows the two-year fictitious journey of IS project manager Webster Tompkins, illustrating the lessons he learns along the way. I bought this book primarily due to the great reviews it garnered on Amazon.com. After all, you can't go wrong when a book rates 4.5 out of 5 stars from over 25 readers, can you? Yep. This book was terrible, because of two very big problems: the book didn't say very much in 300+ pages and what it did say I don't agree with (it also tends to contradict much of Tom Peter's 'In Search of Excellence'). Or, to state it another way, the book points out about five very useful lessons/pieces of information, but takes forever to do so. Those lessons could have been summarized in about five pages--with compelling examples.
7 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
 Not the author's best (includes spoilers), 2005-05-26
While I greatly enjoyed DeMarco's non-fiction books "Peopleware" and "Slack", I felt this attempt at a novel was weak.
*** spoiler warning ***
Tompkins, the main character, has supposedly been chosen for his role in this novel because he is an gifted, experienced manager. Yet pretty much every chapter is a lesson he learns by screwing up. Perhaps I would have found it more palatable if the character was a newly-promoted manager, who knew he was ignorant.
In the end, comes the revelation that, in spite of all the mistakes, he is an excellent manager because he *cares* about people. I don't see how this shows. Among the management problems he faces is reporting to a difficult supervisor up the chain, and the solution to this problem is essentially to have the man poisoned and sent to the hospital! Can you say cognitive dissonance?
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