“Tell me how you’ll measure me, and I’ll tell you how I behave”
—Eliyahu Goldratt
” Tell me how you’ll measure me, and I’ll tell what damn fool things I’ll do to make the measurement look good.”
—Tony Rizzo
” No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all your knowledge is about the past and all your decisions are about the future.”
—Ian E. Wilson
The Achilles Heel of project management, especially in product development, are the estimates of time and resources.
—Jerry Groen
The most complex things are the simplest.
—Agni Celeste
Out of intense complexities intense simplicities emerge.
—Winston Churchill
The whole is simpler than the sum of its parts.
—Willard Gibbs
We struggle with the complexities and avoid the simplicities.
—Norman Vincent Peale
Our old views constrain us. They deprive us from engaging fully with this universe of potentials.
—Margaret J. Wheatley Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World
The pessimist thinks the glass is half empty.
The optimist thinks the glass is half full.
The cost accountant thinks you have twice as much glass as you need.
The throughput accountant thinks you have room for twice as much stuff.
—Rob Newbold
It is a simple task to make things complex, but a complex task to make them simple.
—Meyer’s Law.
“…It is crazy to give the greatest effort to detail when we know the least about the project…at the beginning. Better (much better) is to add detail no sooner than it is needed (acting at the last responsible moment) taking advantage of what is revealed and learned. AND do this with people who are close to the project…people who actually perform the tasks.”
— Hal Macomber Notes on The Underlying Theory of Project Management is Obsolete
Ultimately, the parallels between process and project management give way to a fundamental difference: process management seeks to eliminate variability whereas project management must accept variability because each project is unique.”
— Elton, J. & J. Roe. “Bringing Discipline to Project Management” Harvard Business Review, March-April, 1998.
