Project Management Quotes

All things are created twice; first mentally; then physically. The key to creativity is to begin with the end in mind, with a vision and a blue print of the desired result. ~ Stephen Covey

What is the difference between project management and project leadership? Although there is an elusive line between them, the core difference is that management deals with complexity, whereas leadership deals with change. ~ Jim Highsmith

For an agile project, the ensemble includes core team members, customers, suppliers, executives, and other participants who interact with each other in various ways. It is these interactions, and the tacit and explicit information exchanges that occur within them, that project management practices need to facilitate. ~ Jim Highsmith

Consider the situation: Money that was provided because of social networks rather than need; a project designed for prestige rather than to be used; a lack of monitoring and accountability; and an architect appointed for show by somebody with little interest in the quality of the work. The outcome is hardly surprising: a project that should never have been built was built, and built badly. ~ Tim Harford

Project management is the art of creating the illusion that any outcome is the result of a series of predetermined, deliberate acts when, in fact, it was dumb luck. ~ Harold Kerzner

It's the fricking reality that destroys plans. ~ Sally Gardner

If you don't collect any metrics, you're flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Most literature on the subject of agile methodology... is written from the viewpoint of software developers and programmers, and tends to place its main emphasis on programming techniques and agile project management - testing is usually only mentioned in the guise of unit testing and its associated tools. ...However, unit tests alone are not sufficient and broader-based testing is critical to the success of agile development processes. ~ Tilo Linz

It is easy to launch a project if you have no clue about the cost and schedule. ~ Gerry Geek

We should not prioritize on the basis of project profitability, but rather on how this profitability is affected by delay. ~ Donald G. Reinertsen

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

For every hour of brains, you will be charged three hours. The other two hours go to management and project management, which is to say they are wasted. ~ Robert X. Cringely

In this messianic vision, machine intelligence will come to redeem the universe of its incalculable stupidity. He takes a goal-oriented approach to cosmology, imposing upon the universe itself a kind of corporate project-management structure, composed of a series of key deliverables across deep time. ~ Mark O'Connell

The essence of Agile movement, whether in new product development, new service offerings, software applications, or project management, rests on two foundational goals: delivering valuable products to customers and creating working environments in which people look forward to coming to work each day. ~ Jim Highsmith

I have witnessed boards that continued to waste money on doomed projects because no one was prepared to admit they were failures, take the blame and switch course. Smaller outfits are more willing to admit mistakes and dump bad ideas. ~ Luke Johnson

The deployment of geolocating tags attached to ordinary garbage could paint a surprising picture of the waste management system, as trash is shipped throughout the country in a maze-like disposal process - as we saw in Seattle with our own Trash Track project. ~ Carlo Ratti

The MVP has just those features considered sufficient for it to be of value to customers and allow for it to be shipped or sold to early adopters. Customer feedback will inform future development of the product. ~ Scott M. Graffius

A project goal like a joke. If you have to explain it, it is not good / fun. ~ Gerry Geek

Project stacking is the art of creating projects that multi-task for you, so you don't have to. ~ Richie Norton

Collaboration is the best way to work. It's only way to work, really. ~ Antony Starr

Our goal is to leverage what is already out in the field in terms of partners, but then hire in project management capability and a bit of technical capability. ~ Kevin Rollins

Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That's what management is all about. ~ Tom DeMarco

Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird. ~ Anne Lamott

The conclusion is simple: if a 200-man project has 25 managers who are the most competent and experienced programmers,
fire the 175 troops and put the managers back to programming. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

Have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective. ~ Aristotle.

Any Idiot can point out a problem ... A leader is willing to do something about it! Leaders solve problems! ~ Tony Robbins

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions. ~ Scott M. Graffius

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

Plans are worthless, but planning is invaluable. ~ Peter Drucker

Virtually every company will be going out and empowering their workers with a certain set of tools, and the big difference in how much value is received from that will be how much the company steps back and really thinks through their business processes, thinking through how their business can change, how their project management, their customer feedback, their planning cycles can be quite different than they ever were before. ~ Bill Gates

Those who plan do better than those who do not plan, even should they rarely stick to their plan. ~ Winston Churchill

Stakeholders have varying levels of responsibility and authority when participating on a project. This level can change over the course of the project's life cycle. Their involvement may ~ Project Management Institute

I would compare a project with a country, which is either properly regulated by the laws or enslaved by a dictator whom everybody is supposed to love. What modern management is doing in most companies is the latter scenario. They expect us to love the customer and work just because of that. There are no laws, no discipline, no regulations, and no principle, because, like every dictator, they simply are not competent enough in creating them. Dictators just capture the power and rule by the force: it's much easier than building a system of laws, which will work by itself. The management in software projects also can't create a proper management system, since they simply don't have enough knowledge for that. Instead, they expect our love. Isn't it obvious that rather soon that love turns into hate and we quit or the project collapses? ~ Yegor Bugayenko

By adopting an agile mindset and providing improved engagement, collaboration, transparency, and adaptability via Scrum's values, roles, events, and artifacts, the results were excellent. ~ Scott M. Graffius

The Agile Project Management principles and framework encourage learning and adapting as an integral part of delivering value to customers. ~ Jim Highsmith

Kanban is not a software development lifecycle methodology or an approach to project management. It requires that some process is already in place so that Kanban can be applied to incrementally change the underlying process. ~ David J. Anderson

Shifting customer needs are common in today's marketplace. Businesses must be adaptive and responsive to change while delivering an exceptional customer experience to be competitive. Traditional development and delivery frameworks such as waterfall are often ineffective. In contrast, Scrum is a value-driven agile approach which incorporates adjustments based on regular and repeated customer and stakeholder feedback. And Scrum's built-in rapid response to change leads to substantial benefits such as fast time-to-market, higher satisfaction, and continuous improvement - which supports innovation and drives competitive advantage. ~ Scott M. Graffius

Success in life is about project management. Determine deliverables, make milestones, and always pursue the critical path. ~ Ryan Lilly

Expect the best, plan for the worst and prepare to be surprised. ~ Dennis Waitley

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

Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible. ~ Edwin Land

Just by making the architect role explicit, a team can effectively resolve many technical conflicts. ~ Yegor Bugayenko

Momentum is a fragile force. Its worst enemy: procrastination. Its best friend: a deadline (think Election Day). Implication no. 1 (and there is no no. 2): Get to work! NOW! ~ Tom Peters

Potentially shippable is defined by a state of confidence or readiness, and shipping is a business decision. ~ Scott M. Graffius

That's not to say that all software project management books are crap. Just most of them. One of the few that I've found compelling enough to finish is Johanna Rothman's "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management." She co-wrote it with Esther Derby. ~ Jeff Atwood

Give your product a personality. 37signals may not sell the best project management software in the world, but it has personality. The 37signals team stands for something: uncompromising simplicity. Want an extra feature? Tough. If you want features, buy something else. ~ Neil Davidson

Agile Project Management -like its lean development counterparts- streamlines the development process, concentrating on value-adding activities and eliminating overhead and compliance activities. ~ Jim Highsmith

Hard work is often the easy work you did not do at the proper time. ~ Bernard Meltzer

I've been lucky to find people who want to work with me, whom I respect and like, but the truth is there aren't that many good projects out there. And we make way, way too many movies. So it's not always going to happen with every project. But I try and wait it out. ~ Kirsten Dunst

I'd much rather do an obviously commercial writing project than get a day job. ~ Poppy Z. Brite

OTHER RELAXATION TECHNIQUES
There are many other stress management techniques that can help you to "bring yourself down" quickly when you are highly stressed. You can use them before a situation where anticipation raises tensions that do not automatically subside after a few minutes. You also can use them during an interaction or when a surprise threatens to escalate your stress out of control. Or use them after an encounter has raised your stress level, if it is not subsiding naturally.

Mental Imagery
You experimented with mental imagery in the previous chapter on goal-setting. The use of mental imagery also can be an effective tool for anxiety control. Think of it as a new application of skills you already have: memory and imagination. When I asked you earlier to recall how many windows there are in your bedroom, you used imagery to retrieve the information. Mentally, you went into the room, looked from wall to wall, and counted. That process is mental imagery.
From a relaxation perspective, your nervous system cannot distinguish between reality and imagery. Material passed from the body to the senses, whether real or imagined, is processed the same way. Therefore, imagery can play an important role in inducing internal self-regulation and relaxation. If there is a particular image - such as the warm, sandy beach of the previous exercise, a cool forest clearing covered with a blanket of pine needles, or even a clear blue sky - that represents relax ~ Jonathan Berent

The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. ~ Ashlee Vance

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn't live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul's. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Saeculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part? We avout had it ready-made because we were a part of this project of learning new things. Even if it didn't always move fast enough for people like Jesry, it did move. You could tell where you were and what you were doing in that story. Yul got all of this for free by living his stories from day to ~ Neal Stephenson

First arrested last July after distributing digital files containing a 3D scan of her genitalia to people in return for donations to her project to create the unusual artwork. ~ Anonymous

In the modern city life, if you don't have money , you simply don't have life. ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Retroactive management emphasizes the bottom line. ~ W. Edwards Deming

Conduct your triumph as a funeral. ~ Laozi

DevOps and its resulting technical, architectural, and cultural practices represent a convergence of many philosophical and management movements (including): Lean, Theory of Constraints, Toyota production system, resilience engineering, learning organizations, safety culture, Human factors, high-trust management cultures, servant leadership, organizational change management, and Agile methods. ~ Gene Kim

When your partner behaves unconsciously, relinquish all judgment. Judgment is either to confuse someone's unconscious behavior with who they are or to project your own unconsciousness onto another person and mistake that for who they are. To relinquish judgment does not mean that you do not recognize dysfunction and unconsciousness when you see it. It means "being the knowing" rather than "being the reaction" and the judge. You will then either be totally free of reaction or you may react and still be the knowing, the space in which the reaction is watched and allowed to be. Instead of fighting the darkness, you bring in the light. Instead of reacting to delusion, you see the delusion yet at the same time look through it. Being the knowing creates a clear space of loving presence that allows all things and all people to be as they are. No greater catalyst for transformation exists. If you practice this, your partner cannot stay with you and remain unconscious. ~ Eckhart Tolle

If people keep stepping on you, wear a pointy hat. ~ Joyce Rachelle

What we try to do at Disney and through Disney character voices is really maintain the integrity of our classic characters at all costs. So Ariel needs to be me for every project, and if there are any other Ariels floating around out there, it's not necessarily Disney. ~ Jodi Benson

Making more money will not
solve your problems if cash flow
management is your problem. ~ Robert Kiyosaki

The intellectual is and only can be a militant, engaged as a singularity among others, embarked on the project of co-research aimed at making the multitude. The intellectual is thus not 'out in front' to determine the movements of history or 'on the sidelines' to critique them but rather completely 'inside. ~ Michael Hardt

While it is a truism to observe that if humans were angels, law would be unnecessary, we could equally turn the truism around, and note that if humans were devils, law would be pointless. In this sense, the law-making project always presupposes the improvability, if not the perfectibility, of humankind. Whether our view of human nature tends toward Hobbesian grimness or Rousseauian equanimity, we tend to think of law as critical to reducing brutality and violence. ~ Rosa Brooks

To graduate, Miller added, all Olin students "must complete a yearlong engineering design project in small teams with a corporate sponsor that provides financial support for each project. The projects require a corporate liaison engineer and often involve nondisclosure agreements and new product development." Olin ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Only move forward with creating a product that will be "above the bar. ~ Brian Lawley

I have a right to be blind sometimes. ~ Horatio Nelson

Whether it's watching a $4,000 laptop fall off the conveyor belt at airport security, contending with a software conflict that corrupted your file management system, or begging your family to stop opening those virus-carrying 'greeting cards' attached to emails, all computer owners are highly leveraged and highly vulnerable technology investors. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

The central problem of management is how spontaneous interaction of people within a firm, each possessing only bits of knowledge, can bring about the competitive success that could only be achieved by the deliberate direction of a senior management that possesses the combined knowledge of all employees and contractors ~ Friedrich August Von Hayek

Managers maintain the present while leaders create the future. ~ Orrin Woodward

Early in my career, I was really spoiled with a beautiful project. I got such a good start that I thought, 'Why would I ever take a step back?' Why would I take on something that wasn't meaningful - to me, if nobody else - and powerful and groundbreaking? ~ America Ferrera

If you would know, therefore, who are the fascists in America, you must ask yourselves not who are the men and women most vocal in their denunciations of Hitler and Mussolini. The most ardent enemies of those two leaders were some of their rival fascist dictators in Europe. The test of fascism is not one's rage against the Italian and German war lords. The test is - how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, thee autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government - then you will know you have located the authentic fascist. ~ John T. Flynn

Unfortunately, in seeing ourselves as we truly are, not all that we see is beautiful and attractive. This is undoubtedly part of the reason we flee silence. We do not want to be confronted with our hypocrisy, our phoniness. We see how false and fragile is the false self we project. We have to go through this painful experience to come to our true self. ~ Basil Pennington

Any empathic person who knows how valuable time is will think twice before wasting another person's time, because losing time is losing a part of your life. ~ Innocent Mwatsikesimbe

His goal was to be vigilant against " the bozo explosion" that leads to a company's being larded with second rate talent:

For most things in life, the range between best and average is 30% or so. The best airplane flight, the best meal, they may be 30% better than your average one. What I saw with Woz was somebody who was fifty times better than the average engineer. He could have meetings in his head. The Mac team was an attempt to build a whole team like that, A players. People said they wouldn't get along, they'd hate working with each other. But I realized that A players like to work with A players, they just didn't like working with C players. At Pixar, it was a whole company of A players. When I got back to Apple, that's what I decided to try to do. You need to have a collaborative hiring process. When we hire someone, even if they're going to be in marketing, I will have them talk to the design folks and the engineers. My role model was J. Robert Oppenheimer. I read about the type of people he sought for the atom bomb project. I wasn't nearly as good as he was, but that's what I aspired to do. ~ Walter Isaacson

Many people have been protesting against what they describe as censorship on Goodreads. I disgree. In fact, I would like to say that I welcome the efforts that Goodreads management is making to improve the deplorably low quality of reviewing on this site.
Please, though, just give me clearer guidelines. I want to know how to use my writing to optimize Amazon sales, especially those of sensitive self-published authors. This is a matter of vital importance to me, and outweighs any possible considerations of making my reviews interesting, truthful, creative or entertaining. ~ Manny Rayner

Without sound conservation and management measures, fisheries will quickly become depleted and a basic component of global food security will be lost. ~ Sigmar Gabriel

Yes, but I've already made my fortune in other things. (Solin)
Such as? (Geary)
Viagra. My brother learned to take a personal problem and profit by it. (Arik)
It's true. It pained me to see a man as young as Arik stricken with impotency. Therefore I had to do something to help the poor soul. But alas, there's nothing to be done for it. He's as flaccid as a wet noodle. (Solin)
How creative of you to project your problem onto me. But then, they say celibacy is enough to make a man lose all reason. Guess you're living proof, huh? (Arik) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

The worst lie ever told is that it is easier to destroy than to create. This lie makes people apathetic about a number of imminently avoidable horrors, particularly the nuclear ones. But Oppenheimer didn't just go outside one day and trip over an atomic bomb. Nuclear development required trillions of dollars and a massive sustained effort by America's top politicians, military advisors, and scientific geniuses. Not one damn bit of it was easy. It was certainly harder that sitting down with Stalin or Khrushchev and having a talk . . .
America had options. The path of destruction was a choice. It has always been America's choice, and we citizens have always shrugged, assuming it's too late to turn back the doomsday clock, although we're the ones who wound it in the first place. ~ Israel Morrow

People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project or situation - not about it ~ David Allen