Project Management Chance Dimension - Adages

Sagely reminders that can help make the difference as to whether a project will succeed or not.

Source - "Business Driven PMO Setup - Practical Insights, Techniques and Case Examples for Ensuring Success": Mark Price Perry

1. Murphy's Law: If anything can go wrong, it will.....

2. Parkinson's Law: Work will expand to fill the time available for its completion..

3. Student Syndrome: People will only start to fully apply themselves to a task just before its deadline..

4. Entropy: It is a natural tendency to move from order to disorder..

5. Game Theory: An individual's success in making choices depends on the choices of others (i.e. Nash Equilibrium, Prisoner's Dilemma)

6. Pyrrhic Victory: A victory with a devastating and perilous cost to the victor

7. Winner's Curse: In an auction, the winner will tend to overpay

8. Mexican Stand-off: Multiple opponents with weapons aimed at each other will not fire the first shot

9. Pavlov's Law: Repetitive event conditioning can trigger automatic pre-event responses

10. The Peter Principle: In a hierarchical organization, employees will tend to rise to their own level of incompetence

11. Peter's Corollary: In time, every position tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to do the job

12. The Dilbert Principle: Ineffective workers are moved to the place where they can do the least damage

13. Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes target, it ceases to be a good measure

14. Pareto Principle (the 80/20 rule): 80 percent of the effects come from 20 percent of the causes

15. Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to intentional malice that which can be explained by sheer stupidity