I stumbled on a long list of tongue-in-cheek project management truisms the other day. These were meant to be funny, but they sure hit the nail on the head. Here are the first 21 from the list.

1. Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it.
2. You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.
3. At the heart of every large project is a small project trying to get out.
4. The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situatee.
5. A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would melt anyway when heat is applied.
6. A user will tell you anything you ask, but nothing more.
7. Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.
8. There's never enough time to do it right first time but there's always enough time to go back and do it again.
9. The bitterness of poor quality lasts long after the sweetness of making a date is forgotten.
10. I know that you believe that you understand what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
11. What is not on paper has not been said.
12. A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.
13. If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven't understood the plan.
14. If at first you don't succeed, remove all evidence you ever tried.
15. Feather and down are padding, changes and contingencies will be real events.
16. There are no good project managers - only lucky ones.
17. The more you plan the luckier you get.
18. A project is one small step for the project sponsor, one giant leap for the project manager.
19. Good project management is not so much knowing what to do and when, as knowing what excuses to give and when.
20. If everything is going exactly to plan, something somewhere is going massively wrong.
21. Everyone asks for a strong project manger - when they get one, they don't want one.

Depending on your experience with service level agreements (SLAs), you either love them or hate them. Proponents of SLAs argue that they force IT workers to become customer-friendly, business-savvy employees. Opponents of SLAs feel that they just force IT departments into positions of subservience to the business and perpetuate the stereotype that IT departments are service providers rather than business partners.

Regardless of your perspective, here are 5 things to remember when planning service level [...]

According to a survey done by CIO Magazine in February 2005, these are the top-10 things that IT leaders consider to be the most effective at changing the perception of IT within a company. My comments (in italics) follow some of the bullet points.

Have the business sponsor share ownership and accountability with IT for IT-business initiatives. This one seems like an obvious thing to do. It's one of the golden rules that every project [...]

In the feedback section of a magazine that I read there was an interesting perspective that at first blush seems like a new idea, but I think is just a matter of semantics. Dan Crawley, an IT Manager, suggests that, "There is no such thing as an IT project excluding basic things like regular maintenance. Any project or initiative should have a specific business purpose, and therefore be acknowledged as a business project and [...]

I've always thought it was an admirable quality for a company to have a lot of patents. I think it shows a dedication to research and development along with an implicit, corporate-wide belief in providing value to customers and shareholders for the long-term. While there have been recent stories of patent-hoarding by companies that don't actually produce anything, here's a list of top patent-holding companies in the US that should be recognized and praised [...]

A recent issue of CIO Magazine offers these 10 tips for ERP implementations (see ERP definition).

Make sure you analyze and define business processes first, then choose the system that will work best for your organization.
Don't forget about training; if people don't know how to use the system, they won't.
Test the system for traffic loads that represent your actual traffic, especially during peak times.
Don't buy all of your ERP systems from one vendor: A best-of-breed [...]

A sidebar in a recent issue of CIO Magazine reports some alarming statistics on the general population's understanding of data privacy. The survey was conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center and includes the responses from 1,500 adult US Internet users.

75% of respondents wrongly believe that the existence of a privacy policy on a web site means that a user's information will not be shared with third parties.

68% can't name any [...]

There's a lot that's been written about project management. And there will undoubtedly be more. But after being both a software developer and project manager for 10 years, it has become obvious that there are some things that are just common sense that one should keep in mind.

I'll go out on a limb here and say that the following project management best practices apply to all software projects at all companies using any modern [...]

In a recent report, eMarketer wrote that, "…e-mail marketing's slow demise continue to be premature, as a new eMarketer report shows that nearly three-fourths of US online advertisers used e-mail marketing in 2004." They go on to state this other very impressive statistic, "Projections from eMarketer show that e-mail volume in the US will rise from over 2 trillion message this year — personal, commercial and spam — to nearly 2.7 trillion by 2007." [...]

Like other project management books, Lessons in Project Management pushes a particular methodology: TenStep Project Management Process. It happens to be a good methodology that recognizes the need to deal with projects of all sizes. For instance, the methodology states that a project definition is always required, but there isn't always a need for a metrics process. Or that it is always important to watch out for scope creep, but not always important to [...]