Quotes & Sayings About Projects Management

Delivering a project isn't difficult. What's difficult is delivering a project without first taking the time to plan properly — James Leal

If you've been in the software business for any time at all, you
know that there are certain common problems that plague one
project after another. Missed schedules and creeping requirements
are not things that just happen to you once and then go
away, never to appear again. Rather, they are part of the territory.
We all know that. What's odd is that we don't plan our projects
as if we knew it. Instead, we plan as if our past problems are
locked in the past and will never rear their ugly heads again. Of
course, you know that isn't a reasonable expectation. — Tom DeMarco

To create a big company, you need more partners, as it is hard to handle such a project alone. Such projects bring access to the expertise and management resources of the partners, and their connections above all. — Vladimir Potanin

Interestingly, Agile's scrum-team approach has its own way of aggregating some execution risk. For example, in a traditional "single task owner" approach, the risk of execution is not aggregated at all, leaving that task owner to add a lot of task-level buffer to self-insure and deliver on his commitment. In contrast, a 5-person scrum team aggregates the risk that any single individual will make slow progress, as the other four team members can often make up the deficit.

But why aggregate only up to the scrum-team level? Taking a lesson from the insurance industry, the more that risk can be aggregated, the easier it is to manage. Applied to projects, this will nearly always mean that it's better to aggregate risk at the project level. As a result, an Agile project can improve speed by avoiding sprint-level commitments. — Michael Hannan

Strategic planning for projects management using a project management maturity model — Harold Kerzner

I found the concept of hindsight bias fascinating, and incredibly important to management. One of the toughest problems a CEO faces is convincing managers that they should take on risky projects if the expected gains are high enough. Their managers worry, for good reason, that if the project works out badly, the manager who championed the project will be blamed whether or not the decision was a good one at the time. Hindsight bias greatly exacerbates this problem, because the CEO will wrongly think that whatever was the cause of the failure, it should have been anticipated in advance. And, with the benefit of hindsight, he always knew this project was a poor risk. What makes the bias particularly pernicious is that we all recognize this bias in others but not in ourselves. — Richard H. Thaler

Religion has no power if God is not truly 'dangerous,' but religion also seeks to manage God, and make God safe.
The second commandment speaks against the management of God. We cannot help but make our images of God, for God has given us imagination. But every image we make of God is finally a box: a cage, potentially an idol, from which the living God keeps breaking out. And if we try to keep God there, then God comes out with 'jealousy' to overturn our careful construction.
The third commandment speaks against the management of God. To take God's name in vain is to make God useful to our projects and ourselves. We are wont to trivialize the truth of God and then disparage it for being trivial. We are told God's name in order to love this God, but loving God is not managing God but fearing [respecting] God. And with God, the attitudes of love and fear [respect] are not contradictory but complementary. — Daniel James Meeter

Poor management can increase software costs more rapidly than any other factor. Particularly on large projects, each of the following mismanagement actions has often been responsible for doubling software development costs. — Barry Boehm

Once you start something, finish it. Don't accumulate a backlog of unfinished projects. — Ed Bliss

Only experience can refine a leader's art. High-uncertainty projects are full of anxiety, change, and ambiguity that the team must deal with. It takes a different style of project management, a different pattern of team operation, and a different type of project leader. I've labeled this type of management leadership-collaboration. — Jim Highsmith

Dissent and democracy go hand in hand. It's also good management technique. What traditional executives don't consider is that decisions arising from debate are implemented much more quickly because explanations, alternatives, objections, and uncertainties have already been aired. As a result of democracy, employees have had their say, and projects or ideas have been analyzed from every point of view. — Ricardo Semler

Fifty years later, in the 1920s, the American DuPont Company independently set up a similar unit and called it a Developmental Department. This department gathers innovative ideas from all over the company, studies them, thinks them through, analyses them. Then it proposes to top management which ones should be tackled as major innovative projects. From the beginning, it brings to bear on the innovation all the resources needed: research, development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and so on. It is in charge until the new product or service has been on the market for a few years. — Peter F. Drucker

Time creates Let time work at your projects. — Rossana Condoleo

Success is the delivery of a product that meets expectation — James Leal

A study of project and risk management in software projects in the public sector found that an informal partnership between the project's business owner and the project manager was seen by the latter as providing more effective project proprietorship and governance than the project steering committee [1]. This suggests that the application of governance may be more important than its form. This paper, however, focuses only on formal and explicit governance — Anonymous

Traditional project management focuses on task-level details and loses sight of the benefits projects aim to deliver. — Terry Schmidt