Have you watched Saving Private Ryan? If not it’s time to watch that great movie, in Saving Private Ryan a group of soldiers have been sent behind enemy lines to look for a solider called Ryan, and bring him back home, it was like searching for a needle in a haystack, soldiers were calling the mission a FUBAR (Fu**ed Up Beyond All Recognitions) , your project may also be FUBAR!

1- You start the project without creating the project charter

2- You create a Microsoft Project File and refer to it as the project management plan

3- Stakeholders and/or resources do not understand the difference between the duration and the effort

4- You call for a meeting and stakeholders don’t show up, and two hours later you receive acceptance acknowledgements from some invitees

5- You send to stakeholders an email that includes “please check the attached document”, after one week you find out that you forgot to attach the document!

6- Meetings turn to be cockfights

7- Team members take 3-6 sick leaves a month

8- Sick leaves only happen one day before or after the weekend!

9- You find yourself the only one who is either talking or silent during a meeting

10- You use the acronym CR and stakeholders think it stands for Chicken Run

11- The team starts on execution without finalizing the project plan

12- You estimate project activities alone

13- Number of unread emails in your inbox never gets below 20

14- You start on a fixed price contract project and stakeholders keep adding to the scope after the project has started and yet they don’t expect to pay any extra money

15- Team members make friendships with stakeholders and do minor changes to gain them without telling you

16- Team members take 3 or more smoking breaks a day 15-20 minutes each

17- Project sponsor thinks that the project charter has something to do with a bank

18- Team members stay late at office and you are home watching Oprah

19- Everyone keeps asking you why are you stressed ?!

20- You hear some words such as: Unfeasible, buggy, unresolved, down, risky, dangerous, unreliable, disastrous, morale (nobody mentions it if morale is high!), broken, creep, etc.

21- You say scope creep and everyone else thinks that the scope has got legs

22- You give your card to a new stakeholder, he sees PMP, and asks doest that stand for “Portable Media Player ?!”

23- You are the only one who knows that a project is temporary by definition

24- You change your mind and start to believe that the project is not temporary

25- Stakeholders do not report risks because they feel it may backfire on them

26- You identify the risks yourself and when you discuss them with the stakeholders they try to convince you that those are not risks

27- You wake up every morning and feel you will have a long day

28- You work in a weak matrix, you try all vitamins but it doesn’t make it any stronger

29- You realize that you are doing coordination rather than project management

30- Contingency is used to implement new features

31- You send a minutes of meeting and attendees always claim that what is written is not what they agreed during the meeting

32- You don’t have the guts to say NO and you say YES we can do that, without consulting your team

33- Your team members spend 8 hours a week on status reporting

34- Your business analyst thinks that the only process modelling is flow chart

35- Stakeholders deliberately ignore “T” of SWOT

36- Stakeholders don’t understand what a constraint is

37- Stakeholders think a triple constraint would form a square rather than a triangle

38- You track the project progress using Microsoft PowerPoint

39- Stakeholders and team members think that mind mapping requires some geography skills

40-You think of quitting as soon as you are done with planning because you know the project will never reach closure

41- When you speak of avoiding the Big Bang, the project sponsor tells you that he already has seen it on Discovery Science channel

42- You try to divide the project into phases and stakeholders ask you to stop dragging the project

43- You only see your kids out of their beds on weekend

44- You have bad dreams about stakeholders and team members

45- Marketing team starts to tout the product of the project using fancy features that are not in scope

46- Marketing team asks you to add what they promised customers and tell if we don’t do it, someone else will do it!

47- You use earned value to report progress and sponsor says “it is great we’re earning money before the project is finished”

48- You see sympathy in everyone’s eyes

49- Every time you go to the team leader’s desk you find him browsing monster.com

50- Stakeholders strongly believe that 9 Women will always produce a baby in one month

51- When you think that two parallel tasks with 2 days duration each will always take four days duration

52- Stakeholders are scared to provide signoff for deliverables

53- You stop using the word critical path to avoid scaring the stakeholders

54- Every email you receive is marked as high priority

55- You dream of the weekend on the first hour of the first workday

56- You feel sorry for being a project manager

57- Stakeholders think that Rapport is some kind of vegetables

58- At 20% of the project duration you find out that you spent 80% of the budget

59- Your company wants everything for free

60- Stakeholders think that your team is comprised of labour rather than employees

61- The first response a team member gets from his line manager when he resigns is “Goodbye”

62- On the last working day of an employee who is quitting, when colleagues wish him good luck he responds back saying “Good Luck to you not me!”

63- Every day the building security officer asks you when you are leaving the office because he will turn off the lights and close the main gate at 12:00 AM

64- You tell the security officer “ I don’t know! ”

65- You re-baseline the project plan twice a week

66- You realize that re-baseline process will not help anymore

67- You strongly believe that “If you fail to plan, the result is the same if you successfully plan!”

68- All deadlines are prefixed with “Tentatively”, “By”, “Hopefully”, and “Almost”

69- You feel that a team member is lying when he starts by saying “Honestly Speaking”

70- You ask the team to contribute to a gift, on occasion of a team member’s birthday, by putting some money in the box next to the water cooler and after a couple of days you go to pick the money and you find the box empty

71- You use entire budget of the project go-live celebration to celebrate the first milestone because you know the go-live will never happen

72- Team members think that Pareto Principle is doing 20% of the task and the other 80% does not matter

73- You review the database design because you don’t trust team members

74- Every time you visit Amazon, you get “Why Suicide?: Answers to 200 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions about Suicide” in suggested books pane

75- You send an email to the book author and ask him to add “Being a Project Manager” and you remind him of updating the FAQs count to 201!

76- Your hairdresser asks why you haven’t had a haircut for three months

77- Your spouse becomes very stressful and food becomes tasteless

78- A fixed price contract vendor asks you to fill a change request form for correcting spelling mistakes in the application screens

79- You’re working at vendor side, a client asks for a word processor, you quote for WordPad, you sign fixed price contract, and upon requirements gathering you realize that the customer wanted Microsoft Word 2010!

80- You long to college days

81- You think of shifting to another career that has no “P”

82- The only way you track the project progress is % complete

83- You think of reporting project status on YouTube to ensure stakeholders will not get bored

84- You consider sending minutes of meeting in flash format with visual and sound effects so everyone will be encouraged to view it

85- You use words such as “beg”, “slip”, “screw up”, “resign”, “re-design”, “issue resolution”, etc.

86- Team members think that the Copy & Paste is the greatest invention ever

87- You hit the project sponsor’s car from the back

88- You escalate to the steering committee not less than 5 issues a week, such as team members suffer from stomach troubles, we are out of coffee and we need to increase the budget of beverages, John (the team leader) has been in a lousy mood this week, team members cannot be tamed any more!

89- You just use two conflict resolution techniques: Force and Withdrawal

90- The scope of the project is similar to gasoline and it will never freeze

91- When you follow up on action items everyone seems to be suffering from amnesia

92- You speak with stakeholders about Lessons Learned and they say “ We are not students and you cannot be our teacher”

93- Stakeholders ask for new features and when you ask for cost and time revisions, they tell you “Let the team stay late and work on weekends!”

94- You plot turnover rate in Excel and you find out it is going on exponential rate

95- You think your project will change the Standish group chaos report

96- You start suffering from Planning Phobia and do wrong things right

97- You avoid being at places where you may meet the project sponsor such as: pantry, water cooler, bathroom, food court, cinema, public parks, etc.

98- You forget to document “Project may get cancelled” as a positive risk!

99- You develop your team members skills by showing them how to make a facebook profile visible to friends of friends only and not to anonymous bad hackers

100- You think wrestling is easier and less harmful than project management