The Taite Guide to Project Management

Project Management

Life as a project manager is comparable to a mountain climber’s. The big difference being that when you get to the peak you find there is no safe way down. Whenever  I get really down, my wife reminds me that it takes one women nine months to have a baby and no matter how you try it is impossible to perform the same feat in one month by impregnating nine women. It was a beautiful morning, the sun was shining, the train was on time, the coffee tasted great for a change and Larry was smiling when I reached my desk. The only conclusion I could reach was that tragedy was imminent.
At 10:00 sharp Larry pulled me out of my office for an emergency meeting in the board room. Mr Sharp, the senior end-user, was the first to break the silence.
“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.”
“But the specs clearly showed.” I started but Larry cut me off.

Later in the day the KGB Committee convened.

Michael, in charge of the development , read from a printout.
” According to Janet and her team the code was believed to be bug-free.During the testing phase 47 bugs were found.The team fixed 24 of the bugs and explained to the testing department that the other 23 weren’t really bugs.”
“As a result of further discussions with the users it was agreed that , of the 23 non bugs, 7 were indeed bugs, 9 were actually new features that called for future development, the remaining 8 though not officially bugs were necessary for the implementation and thus had to be fitted into the present version.”
Here Marcia, the KGB commander butted in.
“Mike, doesn’t that make 24.”
“What makes 24?“.
“7 + 9 + 8 = 24. You seem to have created an extra bug. I think there should be a recount.”
Mike was starting to sweat,”According to the protocol there are 23 non bugs, this is not an election, I would appreciate it you didn’t butt in.”
The meeting ended on that note and reconvened two days later.
Again Michael was called to give a status.

“It is my duty to inform you that the testing department has found  that five of the fixes didn’t work and have discovered 15 new bugs.A new turnover is due tomorrow. I will keep the committee updated.”
Two weeks later, due to marketing pressure and an extremely premature product announcement based on overly-optimistic programming schedule, the product is released.

Users find 137 new bugs.
Bruce, the head of the programming team quits and disappears to South America. Following him, three of his team quit too.
A newly assembled programming team fixes almost all of the 137 bugs, but introduces 456 new ones.
Bruce sends the underpaid testing department a postcard from Fiji. The entire testing department quits.
One of the system’s bugs leaks into the main legacy infrastructure causing the company’s general ledger and audit systems to be unavailable for a week.
During the interim, the company is bought out,  in a hostile takeover, by a competitor using profits from their latest release, which had  less than 783 bugs.
A new CEO is brought in by the board of directors. He outsources the job of rewriting  the system from scratch to a company called Bugs Anonymous.
In the first joint meeting, the CTO of Bugs Anonymous, Frederic von Ferdinand  nicknamed Bugsy,  promises to produce  code that  is bug-free…
On the wall in Bugsy’s office is a placard that reads

You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.

For those of you still stupid enough to want the job of project manager, here are a few inportant tips.

1. Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it.
2. At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
3. A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.
4. What you don’t know hurts you
5. There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.
6. What is not on paper has not been said.
7. If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.
8. If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.
9. There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.
10. Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.
11. If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.
12. Fast – cheap – good – you can have any two.
13. A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected – a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.
14. Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.
15. If you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a project manager.
And one more: