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It takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It cannot be done in one month by impregnating nine women.

At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.

The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.

A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.

What you don’t know hurts you.

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.

What is not on paper has not been said.

If at first you don’t succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.

There are no good project managers - only lucky ones. The more you plan the luckier you get. 

Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.

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

The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.

For a project manager, overruns are as certain as death and taxes.

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

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

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

A two-year project will take three years; a three-year project will never finish.

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

Warning: dates in a calendar are closer than they appear to be.

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

If you’re 6 months late on a milestone due next week but really believe you can make it, you’re a project manager.

No project has ever finished on time, within budget, to requirements. Yours won’t be the first to.

Managing IT people is like herding cats.

If you don’t know how to do a task, start it, then ten people who know
less than you will tell you how to do it.

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

The nice thing about not planning is that failure comes as a complete surprise rather than being preceded by a period of worry and depression.