.NET Tips and Tricks

- Nothing is impossible for the person who doesn’t have to do it himself.

- The sooner you begin coding the later you finish.

- Any project can be estimated accurately (once it’s completed).

- The most valuable and least used WORD in a project manager’s vocabulary is “NO”.

- The most valuable and least used PHRASE in a project manager’s vocabulary is “I don’t know”.

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

- You can con a sucker into committing to an impossible deadline, but you cannot con him into meeting it.

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

- If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.

- The more desperate the situation the more optimistic the situate.

- If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck.

- Too few people on a project can’t solve the problems – too many create more problems than they solve.

- A problem shared is a buck passed.

- A change freeze is like the abominable snowman: it is a myth and would anyway melt when heat is applied.

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

- A user is somebody who tells you what they want the day you give them what they asked for.

- Of several possible interpretations of a communication, the least convenient is the correct one.

- What you don’t know hurts you.

- The conditions attached to a promise are forgotten, only the promise is remembered.

- There’s never enough time to do it right first time but there’s always enough time to go back and do it again.

- 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.

- Estimators do it in groups – bottom up and top down.

- Good estimators aren’t modest: if it’s huge they say so.

- The same work under the same conditions will be estimated differently by ten different estimators or by one estimator at ten different times.

- A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

- What is not on paper has not been said.

- If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.

- If you fail to plan you are planning to fail.

- If you don’t attack the risks, the risks will attack you.

- A little risk management saves a lot of fan cleaning.

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

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

- If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, you haven’t understood the plan.

- When all’s said and done a lot more is said than done.

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

- Never put off until tomorrow what you can put off until the day after.

- Feather and down are padding – changes and contingencies will be real events.

- There are no good project managers – only lucky ones.

- The more you plan the luckier you get.