Just for a Laugh: The Lighter Side of Project Management

Top 10 Signs You're a Project Manager

1. Becoming tired of having a social life beyond work.
2. Spending hours planning and re-planning a Friday night out.
3. Thinking Rommel would have been more effective if he'd used a Gantt chart.
4. Using so much jargon customers think you're speaking a foreign language.
5. Organising your life into milestones.
6. Setting time-based tasks for your family at weekends.
7. Buying a personal copy of Microsoft Project for use at home.
8. Giving regular status reports to your other half while doing the decorating.
9. Creating a Gantt chart to plan your holidays.
10. Referring to food at dinner parties as "deliverables.

Top 10 Things a Project Manager Should Never Say to a Customer

1. If you're as confused as I am then you know as much as I do.
2. Don't worry it's easier than it looks.
3. I'm not sure what happened; it worked last time.
4. Implementation? We'll worry about that when we get to it.
5. The problem is we have too much work for too few people.
6. My last project was a complete disaster.
7. We can deliver much earlier than you're asking for.
8. We'll definitely come in under budget.
9. Are you stupid or what?
10. Nothing can go wrong, I promise.

Top 10 Things You'll Never Hear From a Project Manager

1. I didn't see that risk coming!
2. This whole project is based on a case study I read in the paper last week.
3. I'm not sure this project is going to deliver any benefits.
4. The project is running well ahead of schedule.
5. I think we'll miss that milestone by quite a long way.
6. We're charging you far too much to run this project.
7. There's far more budget and time than is needed.
8. I didn't actually have a plan; I was playing it by ear.
9. I can't take credit for that success.
10. How about paying us based on the success of the project?

You Know It Is Time to Get Out of Project Management When…

• You refer to your other half as the budget holder.
• Your personal life is planned to the end degree.
• You write a Project Brief for your next holiday.
• Safe sex involves a risk log and contingency plan.
• You organise your family into a more efficient team based structure.
• The "deliverables" for Saturday are the shopping and washing.
• You mitigate the risk of your in-laws visiting.
• Finding yourself explaining what Gantt, PERT and CPM diagrams are to people down the pub.
• You enjoy reading the Project Management Body of Knowledge in bed.

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