Tom DeMarco

Tom DeMarco is the author of sixteen published books. He has been, since its founding, a Principal of The Atlantic Systems Guild, the development of a system think tank with offices in the US, Great Britain, and Germany. He is a past winner of the Jean-Dominique Warnier Prize for “lifetime contribution to the information sciences.” He is a founder and past president of Pop! Tech Conference, and a Fellow of the Cutter Consortium.

Tom is the author of ten books on management, organizational design, and systems development and six works of fiction. The best-known of his books is Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, published by Random House, Broadway Books Division. It addresses the question, Why are we all so damned busy? And offers some unsettling answers.

The classic, Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams – written with co-author Tim Lister – is now in a third edition, published by Addison Wesley in 2013. Peopleware has to date, been published in eight languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Mandarin, and Simplified Chinese. Tom and frequent co-author Tim Lister also wrote Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects [Dorset House]. (If you think waltzing with a bear is risky, try managing a software project.)

Tom’s 1997 book, The Deadline: A Novel About Project Management [Dorset House Press], is the story of a veteran software manager who finds he has bet his life on a project deadline. The book is about managing as though your life were on the line. Earlier works include Why Does Software Cost So Much? (And Other Puzzles of the Information Age) [Dorset House], Controlling Software Projects: Management, Measurement, and Estimation, [Prentice Hall], and back in the Dark Ages, Structured Analysis and System Specification [Prentice-Hall]. He has also written more than one hundred articles and papers about management and the system development process.

Tom’s career began at Bell Telephone Laboratories, where he served as part of the now-legendary ESS-1 project. In later years, he managed real-time projects for La CEGOS Informatique in Paris and, while working for Svenska Phillips in Stockholm, was responsible for distributed online banking systems installed in Sweden, Holland, France, and Finland. He has lectured and consulted throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, Australia, and the Far East.

He has a BSEE degree from Cornell University, an M.S. from Columbia University, a diploma from the University of Paris at the Sorbonne, plus an honorary doctorate from City University London (2003). In 1999 he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE. He is the winner of the 1999 Wayne Stevens Award for his contribution to software engineering methods. He is a Visiting Scholar at the University of Maine, where he has taught three years of an undergraduate Ethics course. His consulting practice is largely focused on organizational development, software methods, and litigation support. Tom lives in Camden, Maine, with his wife, Sally O. Smyth.