Project Management Sayings

I found these while surfing the web and thought that they might amuse you:

The sooner you start a task the later you finish.

What is not on paper has not been said.

If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

The sooner you get behind schedule, the more time you have to make it up.

A badly planned project will take three times longer than expected - a well-planned project only twice as long as expected.

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.

If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.

Good project managers know when not to manage a project.

If there were no problem people there'd be no need for people who solve problems.

Some projects finish on time in spite of project management best practices.

Good project managers admit mistakes: that's why you so rarely meet a good project manager.

Fast - cheap - good: you can have any two.

The first 90% of a project takes 90% of the time the last 10% takes the other 90%.

The project would not have been started if the truth had been told about the cost and timescale.

To estimate a project, work out how long it would take one person to do it then multiply that by the number of people on the project.

If it wasn't for the 'last minute', nothing would get done.

Nothing gets done till nothing gets done.

There is no such thing as scope creep, only scope gallop.

Anything that can be changed will be changed until there is no time left to change anything.

If project content is allowed to change freely the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.

A project gets a year late one day at a time.

I hope that a least a few of these saying raised at least a smile

Why not email me if you have more - mike.austin@coreis.co.uk

Never use a password ever again

Most organisations have severe sanctions in place for folks that write down their passwords or change them infrequently, worse still those that have 'password' as their password.
The problem is of course that passwords are difficult to remember, even more so if you are required to change it every thirty days! Take comfort - you will never need to remember a password ever again.
The solution is to use a pass-phrase. Instead of remembering Vy65d7T use, perhaps, a line from your favourite song - in my case that Talking Heads classic 'burning down the house' remove the spaces and viola! An easy remembered way into your system, just make sure that it is at least 14 characters long, that should make it uncrackable for at least thirty days when you change it for another much loved lyric.
Another risk mitigated
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Risk Mitigation???

Labourer’s wife Bridget Driscoll took a trip to Crystal Palace (South East London) on 17 August 1896 and whilst there was run over by Arthur Edsall's imported Roger-Benz and so became the first road accident fatality in the United Kingdom.

So what was the risk involved, the car was reportedly doing the incredibly fast speed of 4 miles per hour, the driver said that he shouted a warning when he saw the woman in his path, he also said that he rang the warning bell – not much risk you may think!

Jerry Savage a local historian at the Upper Norwood Library remarks that the Victorians had no real sense of Health and Safety and so would probably have accepted the death as some sort of tragedy, but a few risk mitigations were put in place – it was soon required that three people were to take charge of a vehicle, a driver, a fireman to keep the car fuelled and a flag man to walk 60 yards in front of the car. Speed limits were reduced to 2 miles per hour in a town and 4 miles per hour in the countryside.

The coroner at Mrs Driscoll’s inquest said that he hoped hers would be the last such fatality – it is thought that since then more than 550,000 people have died on our roads.

Ideas for thriving in today's market

I was recently introduced to these ideas and thought that I would share them with you

1. Secure your core customers.  It costs five to seven times as much to get a new customer as it does to keep the ones you already have.
2. Push for greater market share. Slashing prices is not the way to go – it signals to your competitors that you are likely to be in trouble. So concentrate on service to your established customers and selling that same service to new  prospects
3. Research customers now more than ever. Stay close to your customers; make sure that you understand how they are changing. You don’t want to find yourself relying on old information, or with a business model that customers don’t want.
4. Seek to increase - or a least maintain - your marketing budget. This is the worst time to think about cutting your marketing budget. Progressive organizations add to their marketing budgets in hard times.
5. Quickly drop what is not working. Removing failing activities before they cause too much damage.
6. Don’t discount your best products. Discounting tells your customers that you were probably overcharging in the first place, it also makes it difficult if not impossible to raise the prices again.
7. Save the best; lose the others. In a difficult economy, you need to make your best products even better. Don’t waste time or money on products that are adding nothing to your core income.

People who impress

Some 40 years ago I worked for a remarkable man, he had been bankrupt twice, but such was his belief in what he was doing he pawned (hocked - if you are in the USA) his wife's wedding ring to start his business a third time. He died a multi-millionaire!

But you know what impressed me most? When the welders refused to work overtime to get a warehouse ready for the grand opening - he stripped of his shirt and did it himself.

Makes you think