Eight Basic Principles of Project Management

1. No major project is ever installed on time, within budget, with the same staff that started it. Yours will not be the first.
2. Projects progress rapidly until they become 90 percent complete; they then remain 90 percent complete forever.
3. One advantage of fuzzy project objectives is that they let you avoid the embarrassment of estimating the corresponding costs.
4. When things are going well, something will go wrong.
   1. When things just can't get any worse, they will.
   2. When things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
5. If project content is allowed to change freely, the rate of change will exceed the rate of progress.
6. No system is ever completely debugged; attempts to debug a new system inevitably introduce new bugs that are even harder to find.
7. A carelessly planned project will take three times longer to complete than you expected; a carefully planned project will only take twice as long.
8. Project teams detest progress reports, because these reports vividly manifest their lack of progress.