20 Project Management Lessons
Scott Berkun's 20 Project Management lessons of all time:
- Everything is a project. Every activity or goal in life can be framed as one. If you master how projects work you can master your life.
- The three things you need are good people, clear goals and wise leaders. If you have all three, success is possible. If you have two or less, good luck.
- Anyone can ship garbage on time. Many teams ship trash late. The quality bar in the world is low.
- Project management in many organizations is project rescue in disguise.
- All schedules are guesses. Better schedules consider more factors but you can never account for them all.
- Projects are made of people. People thrive on trust. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose.
- Clarity creates speed. Going slow to go fast is a sign leaders have succeeded before.
- Good leaders earn trust, teach well and model behavior for everyone.
- Stupidity mostly travels down. Fools at the bottom are easy to ignore. Stupidity from the top is hard to escape.
- Odds of success improve the smaller and clearer your goals are.
- Projects in trouble should have smaller teams and simpler ambitions.
- The iron triangle of cost, scope and time can not be beaten. You can not escape tradeoffs and if you try it will destroy you.
- The more goals you have the more ways there are to fail.
- All work lists should be in priority order. This is harder and more important than it sounds.
- You must be good at saying no, otherwise your yes means nothing.
- Most project failures were people problems first.
- Resilience beats perfection. Things go wrong but healthy teams grow from it. Calm seas make poor sailors.
- Learn from mistakes. Avoid blame. If you hide it or shame it you will repeat it.
- When in doubt, look up. Chronic problems are caused by leaders.
- Good people love systems that help them do good work. If they resist, something is wrong.
- (bonus) If you want to look back with pride, make sure your projects are used to help the world.