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CHAPTER 3 PROJECT MANAGEMENT CONCEPTS 63

nents; and assists the teams in research, evaluation, and document preparation. The
importance of a librarian cannot be overemphasized. The librarian acts as a con-
troller, coordinator, and potentially, an evaluator of the software configuration.
A variation on the democratic decentralized team has been proposed by Con-
stantine [CON93], who advocates teams with creative independence whose approach
to work might best be termed innovative anarchy. Although the free-spirited approach
to software work has appeal, channeling creative energy into a high-performance
team must be a central goal of a software engineering organization. To achieve a
“No matter what the high-performance team:
problem is, it’s • Team members must have trust in one another.
always a people
problem.” • The distribution of skills must be appropriate to the problem.
Jerry Weinberg • Mavericks may have to be excluded from the team, if team cohesiveness is to

be maintained.
Regardless of team organization, the objective for every project manager is to help
create a team that exhibits cohesiveness. In their book, Peopleware, DeMarco and
Lister [DEM98] discuss this issue:

We tend to use the word team fairly loosely in the business world, calling any group of peo-
ple assigned to work together a "team." But many of these groups just don't seem like teams.
They don't have a common definition of success or any identifiable team spirit. What is
missing is a phenomenon that we call jell.
A jelled team is a group of people so strongly knit that the whole is greater than the sum
of the parts . . .
Once a team begins to jell, the probability of success goes way up. The team can become
unstoppable, a juggernaut for success . . . They don't need to be managed in the traditional
way, and they certainly don't need to be motivated. They've got momentum.
DeMarco and Lister contend that members of jelled teams are significantly more pro-
ductive and more motivated than average. They share a common goal, a common
culture, and in many cases, a "sense of eliteness" that makes them unique.
Jelled teams are the
ideal, but they’re not But not all teams jell. In fact, many teams suffer from what Jackman calls “team
easy to achieve. At a toxicity” [JAC98]. She defines five factors that “foster a potentially toxic team envi-
minimum, be certain ronment”:
to avoid a “toxic
environment.” 1. A frenzied work atmosphere in which team members waste energy and lose
focus on the objectives of the work to be performed.
2. High frustration caused by personal, business, or technological factors that
causes friction among team members.
3. “Fragmented or poorly coordinated procedures” or a poorly defined or
improperly chosen process model that becomes a roadblock to accomplish-
ment.