|
Top 10 Laws Of Project Management
I. No major project is ever installed on time, within budget, or with/by the same staff that started it. Yours will not be the first.
II. Projects progress quickly until they reach the 90 percent complete status, then they remain at the 90 percent complete level forever.
III. One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs.
IV. Daily operating rules governing the overall process:
- When things are going well, something will go wrong.
- When things just can't get any worse, they will.
- When things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
V. If project content is allowed to change freely, then the rate of change will absolutely exceed the rate of progress.
VI. No System is ever completely debugged. Attempts to debug a System inevitably introduce new bugs which are even harder to find and have greater consequences.
Note: If user of Microsoft products, substitute "features" for "bugs".
VII. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than expected, a carefully planned project will only take twice as long as originally planned.
VIII. Project teams detest project reporting because it vividly manifests their lack of progress.
IX. No worthwhile project should ever have a stated goal of having an overall reduction of paper flow. If this is a stated project goal, the project should be abandoned as it is immediately doomed to complete and utter failure.
Any project being implemented has two levels of consequences: Anticipated consequences (anticipated results) and unanticipated consequences (unanticipated results). By definition, the latter are ALWAYS greater and have more of an impact than the former.
|