It follows, then, that the best way of having success in an LIMS project is to make sure that the right people are put in a situation to succeed. Without that basis, there is little chance of the project succeeding.

This is the basic premise of one of my favorite books on IT projects: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This book, first published in 1987, is hardly new. Yet the lessons contained within it are as applicable today as they were 20 years ago. A 2nd edition of the book was released in 1999 that updates some of the original topics contained within. I highly recommend this edition; if you work on projects that implement software, read it.

From a project perspective, several of the topics in the book strike home and apply to almost every project I have seen. Following are two of the book's premises.

1) Work Environment Matters for Knowledge Workers
If it is true that people implement systems (and I haven't seen a LIMS system yet that implements itself), then people that have a good work environment do a better job of implementing systems than those that do not.

DeMarco and Lister go into great detail about productivity gains available by putting knowledge workers in the proper environment. They also do a good job of mocking the furniture police that decide which is the best half-cubicle wall for the most important project resources to sit behind.

As a consultant, I have the opportunity to see the working environment of many companies. On the last three major projects I worked, the consulting resources had the following working environments:

a) a large "room" with 6 consultants in it. The walls to the "room" did not go up to the ceiling, it had no door, and it was next to the conference room (which also did not have walls that went to the ceiling). If anyone on the floor breathed, everyone heard it.

b) a cube farm in a room that seated about 60 people. The acoustics of the room allowed a person at one end to hear the phone conversations taking place on the other end. Of course conference rooms were converted to temporary work areas, so workers had speakerphone telecons in their cubes. Again, every sound and phone call was heard by everyone. Both this and the environment above required knowledgeable workers to put headphones on just to try to concentrate on work.

c) no place for consultants to sit at all. Each week, every consultant tried to find a full-time person's desk that was not around that week. They would then stake that out for the week. Some weeks when not enough people were out sick, it was two to a desk. Luckily at this place, it was rare for people to not be out sick.

Each project wanted the consultants to be on-site as much as possible to boot. If you use consultants or contractors on your project, take note: putting multiple people together in a room does not foster communication; it fosters distraction. I recognize that these work environments are not the domain of consultants only. Full-time employees work in these conditions. Accepting these types of environments guarantees inefficiency and delays.

2) Part of the manager's (project or organizational) job is to allow project members to get into a creative zone instead of being constantly interrupted.

The authors of the book describe that in order to do really productive work, a person has to get into a ' creative zone'. Anyone familiar with sports or who has been engrossed in a development project at 2:00 am will register with the idea of a time when they were ultra-productive for a period of time. According to the book, it takes a person a significant amount of time to build up the concentration to get into a zone. Every phone call, email, and instant message can interrupt the concentration and prevent a person from getting into their ultra-productive time. In my opinion, it is part of a project manager's job to make sure that team members are allowed to go interrupt-free as often as possible in order to be productive. The opposite (constant meetings, emails, and phone calls) simply causes so many distractions in a day that nothing ever gets done.

Peopleware has many more incredibly relevant points that I haven't touched here and I have many more stories from projects that did not follow the basic tenets of the book - but that is a future blog…