20 things you know only if you have worked on an IT project

Plans are worthless. Planning is essential~ Dwight D. Eisenhower

1.  The road to a late project is paved with extra requirements
2. Trying to cleanse data in a legacy system is as easy as staring at the sun
3. ERD’s are always wrong but no one wants to fix it
4. 5 minutes after creating a project plan it’s out of date
5. The sales team always over sold the solution
6. Data migration takes at least 4 times as estimated
7. I have seen developers 99% finished on development and the last 1% take as long as the first 99% 🙂
8. There are many projects Agile in name but chaos in reality
9. Adding more people to a project can make it go slower
10. Code is created by trial, error, error, error, error, error, error, success, error, success
11. All bugs are blamed on developers who have left the project
12. Projects are a team sport, played by individuals
13. 50 percent of problems on IT projects are people, the other 80 percent are estimates and expectations
14. Assumptions cause bugs, incorrect requirements and wrong estimates
15. Estimates are considered commitments by management, best guesses by developers
16. Nothing integrates out of the box
17. Every project is different. What worked on previous projects might not work on current project.
18. The solution you end with is never the solution designed at the start
19. Customer don’t know what they want until you show them what you done, then they know it’s not that
20. When trust is gone, project failure won’t be long

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