It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by nine women.
- Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.
- You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.
- At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
- The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.
- A problem shared is a buck passed.
- A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would melt anyway when heat is applied.
- A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.
- Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.
- What you don’t know hurts you.
- There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.
- The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.
- I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realise that what you heard is not what I meant.
- What is not on paper has not been said.
- A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.
- If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.
- If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.
- Feather and down are padding, changes and contingencies will be real events.
- There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.
- The more you plan the luckier you get.
- A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.
- Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.
- If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.
- Everyone asks for a strong project manger – when they get one, they don’t want one.
- Overtime is a figment of the naive project manager’s imagination.
- Quantitative project management is for predicting cost and schedule overruns well in advance.
- The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.
- Metrics are learned men’s excuses.
- For a project manager, overruns are as certain as death and taxes.
- Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.
- Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.
- There is such a thing as an unrealistic timescale.
- The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.
- A two-year project will take three years; a three-year project will never finish.
- When the weight of the project paperwork equals the weight of the project itself, the project can be considered complete.
- A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.
- Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.
- Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.
- There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.
- A project gets a year late one day at a time.
- If you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a project manager.
- No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirements.
- Yours won’t be the first to.
- Activity is not achievement.
- Managing IT people is like herding cats.
- If you don’t know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know less than you will tell you how to do it.
- If you don’t plan, it doesn’t work. If you do plan, it doesn’t work either. Why plan!
- The person who says it will take the longest and cost the most is the only one with a clue how to do the job.
- The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.
- The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.
- Good control reveals problems early – which only means you’ll have longer to worry about them.
