Fred Brooks Quotes

Everybody in the real world will agree - the moment a project is behind deadline, quality assurance tends to go out the window.

How does a project get to be a year behind schedule? One day at a time.

You can’t really understand the challenges involved with any major tech project until you start trying to build it.

I don't think I've ever worked on anything that wasn't way bigger than we expected. That's all the way back to working on fighting games at Paradox. Everything seems to balloon when more and more people get involved.

Don't bring on the design engineers too soon. One of the worst things you can do in the early phases of a project is to bring on a bunch of detailed design engineers and then not give them clear direction and close supervision.

So, I have the responsibility of making sure that HUD functions and runs well.

A rational model of software is to design it quickly - the economic pressure to improvise presents an interesting challenge.

I pushed the process forward by saying, 'We should do this, this, and this right now. Please find the budget for me to find a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, so we can do the preliminary work.'

We need to make sure that the things we are already working on turn out to do the things we believe they can do and creating value both for the world and ultimately for Google.

It's just really hard to work and get better, building and planning for the future with the new Monte Carlo and keeping the race team intact and keeping them healthy.

Enterprise is hard work. You have to integrate the client with the optimized systems of all the servers and software.

We've always been the development project that lived in a time pressured setting and always where commercial entities were relying heavily on releases in a certain time frame.

About half my time is spent on business operation type stuff.

The biggest fragility in a project is often just the inability to be able to explain to people why you are doing it, and when you're going to do it, and what's going to happen.

Even if bureaucratic sloth can be eliminated, it still takes time to build things.

The 6 Ps: Proper Planning Prevents Piss-Poor Performance

Alaskans need some certainty and clarity over how the Pebble Partnership intends to proceed. I understand the complexity of a project like this, and I appreciate the investments that have been made in Alaska already. But a reliable timeline has been missing, and I hope that the companies will provide one soon.

A big part of my job is to accelerate our ability to bring innovative products to our customers more quickly.

Service of any type requires preparation.

Projects are usually undertaken to either solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity. The probability that the project - even if precisely executed - will complete on time, on budget, and on performance is typically small. Project management is utilized to increase this probability. So in a sense, project management is risk management.

If the business were a play, Act One is, 'Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We're going to make something great!' Act Two is, 'We're six months behind on back-end development.'

Harman had great brands, but the processes were falling apart.

The amount of staff we have in academies is... I've never seen anything like it. It's good to take care of the players but sometimes I get confused by the number of people who have an impact on one kid - we're talking 100 people or more. It's quite a heavy load.

As you get to the end of the project you want to run all the tests cases against one version and make sure that you know that that version passed everything. And so as you get late in the project you get a little more conservative about making radical changes to the software.

Creeping featurism is a disease, fatal if not treated promptly. There are some cures, but, as usual, the best approach is to practice preventative medicine.