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What are the best ways to plan for reducing errors in the workplace? What do experts recommend?
The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick P. Brooks offers guidance to managers leading large teams, especially teams coordinating detail-oriented projects with lots of moving parts. In the book, Brooks explains how to manage the inevitable errors that arise from managing teams performing complex tasks.
Keep reading to learn Brooks’s three rules for reducing errors in the workplace.
How to Reduce Errors in the Workplace
No matter how carefully you plan your project, errors and problems inevitably arise. Regardless of the industry, large projects typically involve a lot of testing, repairing, and perfecting. Reducing errors in the workplace will help to bring your project to completion on time, says Frederick P. Brooks. Brooks led the division of IBM that programmed computer operating systems in the 1960s. He managed over 100 employees to create cutting-edge programs that required an intense degree of coordination: If all the parts didn’t work together correctly, his operating system wouldn’t work. Brooks found that the more parts he needed to coordinate with each other, the more opportunities there were for errors.
Below, we’ll explain Brooks’s three golden rules for reducing errors in the workplace, based on the advice from his book The Mythical Man-Month.
Rule #1: Plan to Throw Out the First Draft
Brooks argues that you should expect to discard your first attempt at your project and treat it as a learning opportunity. He cautions against sinking time and effort into fixing your first draft at all. In his experience at IBM, there were so many errors in the first attempt, that it was more efficient to simply learn from the process, cut his losses, and begin fresh again. Therefore, to apply his advice for reducing errors to your own workplace, Brooks advises you to treat your first draft of the entire project as a trial run.
| Reducing Complexity in the First Draft In later editions of the book, Brooks changed his mind about throwing out the first draft after discovering a new process that made this unnecessary. After leaving IBM, Brooks became a computer science professor, where he was influenced by many of the ideas of his close friend, programmer David Parnas. Parnas introduced Brooks to a new process in which one “grew” the program from the middle out. The process required drawing a distinction between a program’s core functions and its ancillary functions. Core functions are foundational to a program’s operations, whereas ancillary functions are the added features built on that foundation. If you imagine your computer program as a tree, the core functions are like the roots and the trunk, whereas the ancillary functions are like the branches and leaves. In Parnas’s strategy, the core functions would be programmed first and tested independently before moving on to the program’s ancillary functions—like growing the trunk before the branches. In Brooks’s previous process, the first draft would be a complete tree: branches, leaves, and trunk. Parnas’s process reduced complexity by reducing the number of components that need to work together in the first draft. Once Brooks adopted this strategy, he no longer found it necessary to throw out the entire first draft. |
Rule #2: Expect to Create Additional Errors
One of the most vexing parts of software development is that repairing errors comes with the risk of adding new errors, because fixing code requires changing it. Once you change something, you always run the risk that it won’t coordinate as well with all the other components. Brooks offers two main takeaways.
1. You will reach a point where repairing and debugging provides diminishing returns. There’s no value in polishing a program to perfection forever because your project can never be perfect. To apply this logic to your own workplace—plan on cutting your losses eventually and deciding when the project is good enough.
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Here's what you'll find in our full The Mythical Man-Month summary:
- A guide to managing large teams and completing complicated projects
- How to keep your staff working together smoothly
- Strategies for keeping long-term projects on schedule
