50 Fun Facts About Project Management

Which Australian landmark opened ten years late in 1973, at more than fourteen times its original budget?

Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 after rows over cost and delay, leaving an Australian team led by Peter Hall to complete his design.

The Agile framework Scrum takes its name from which sport, via a 1986 Harvard Business Review paper?

Rugby inspired the name: authors Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka likened the best development teams to players who go the distance as a unit, passing the ball back and forth.

Jira, the issue tracker used by software teams, is named after the Japanese name of which movie monster?

Godzilla is Gojira in Japanese, and Jira keeps the last two syllables. Atlassian's developers had used the nickname for Bugzilla, the bug tracker they relied on before writing their own.

Which adage, coined in a 1955 Economist essay, says that work expands to fill the time available?

Parkinson's law grew out of naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson's experience of the British Civil Service. His follow-up 'law of triviality' gave us the word bike-shedding.

Which American engineer popularised, around 1910, the bar chart of tasks against time that bears his surname?

Henry Gantt popularised the chart around 1910–1915, but Karol Adamiecki had devised a similar 'harmonogram' in 1896 and published it only in Russian and Polish, so his name never stuck.

Which city's Olympic stadium, nicknamed 'The Big Owe', took thirty years to pay off?

Montreal finally cleared the bill for its 1976 Olympic stadium in November 2006, helped by a special tobacco tax. The total had reached C$1.61 billion.

In project scheduling, which term names a key checkpoint, such as a phase sign-off, that has no duration of its own?

Milestone is borrowed from the roadside distance stones of ancient Rome, first set up on the Appian Way. On a project timeline it flags a point such as a start date, an end date or a budget review rather than a piece of work.

Kanban, whose name means 'signboard' in Japanese, was developed by engineer Taiichi Ohno at which carmaker?

Toyota began studying supermarkets in the late 1940s, and kanban copies their shelves: a card signals that stock has been used, and only then is more made.

Which New York skyscraper was structurally complete in 1931, just 410 days after construction began?

Empire State Building steelwork topped out in only 23 weeks, twelve days early. The whole tower cost about $41 million, including the demolition of the old Waldorf-Astoria hotel on the site.

Which word completes the term 'scope ___', meaning uncontrolled growth in what a project must deliver?

Creep is the word: scope creep also goes by requirement creep or kitchen sink syndrome, and software teams know its cousin as feature creep.

Which NASA spacecraft was lost in 1999 because its builder used US customary units while NASA used metric?

Mars Climate Orbiter went silent on 23 September 1999 as it tried to enter orbit. An investigation blamed a mismatch between Lockheed Martin's figures and the newton-seconds NASA's software expected.

Kaoru Ishikawa's cause-and-effect diagram of the 1960s is nicknamed after the skeleton of which animal?

Fish is the animal: the problem sits at the head, facing right, and possible causes branch off the backbone like ribs. Ishikawa pioneered his quality methods in the Kawasaki shipyards.

In the acronym SMART, set out by George Doran in 1981 for writing objectives, what does the M stand for?

Measurable was Doran's M. His other letters stood for specific, assignable, realistic and time-related, so the 'achievable' many people learn today was not in his original list.

A SWOT analysis weighs strengths, weaknesses and opportunities against which fourth factor, the T?

Threats complete the set. Strengths and weaknesses are usually treated as internal, while opportunities and threats are usually seen as coming from outside.

Which rule of thumb, named after an Italian economist, says about 80% of results come from 20% of causes?

Pareto principle is the label that grew from Joseph Juran's 1941 reading of Vilfredo Pareto, who had shown that about 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population.

In Six Sigma's martial-arts-style ranks, which belt colour sits above Green and marks a full-time specialist?

Black Belts devote all of their time to Six Sigma, while Green Belts take it on alongside their other job responsibilities. Master Black Belts act as internal coaches to both.

Which US city's 'Big Dig' buried a downtown highway and became America's most expensive road project?

Boston's Big Dig was scheduled to finish in 1998 for $2.8 billion. It wrapped up in December 2007 at $14.6 billion, after leaks, design flaws and criminal charges.

Which European capital's new airport opened in 2020, nine years late, after faulty construction and corruption?

Berlin Brandenburg Airport was due to open in October 2011 and finally welcomed passengers on 31 October 2020, 14 years after construction started.

In startup jargon popularised by Eric Ries, what does MVP stand for, a first release with just enough features?

Minimum viable product was coined in 2001 by Frank Robinson. The idea is to put something usable in front of early customers and let their feedback steer what gets built next.

Bruce Tuckman's 1965 model says teams go through forming, norming, performing and which conflict-ridden stage?

Storming comes second, when members start to voice opinions and clash as power and status are assigned. Tuckman held that every phase was necessary and inevitable for a group to grow.

Which sequential development model is usually traced to a diagram in a 1970 paper by Winston Royce?

Waterfall is a word Royce's paper never uses. He drew the famous diagram as an example of a flawed process, calling it 'risky' because testing came only at the very end.

Which nickname is given to the project management model in which cost, time and scope constrain one another?

Iron triangle thinking goes back to Martin Barnes, who in 1969 drew a triangle with cost, time and quality at its corners for a course on contract control.

The Agile Manifesto was drafted in 2001 by seventeen developers at the Snowbird ski resort in which US state?

Utah won what one attendee called the fiercest debate of all, the venue, beating wintry Chicago and the Caribbean island of Anguilla because enough of the group wanted to ski.

In Scrum, what name is given to the fixed work cycle that most commonly lasts two weeks?

Sprint is the term, also known as an iteration or timebox. Each one opens by setting a target and closes with a demonstration of the finished work to gather feedback.

In project scheduling, what name is given to the longest chain of dependent tasks from start to finish?

Critical path analysis was developed in the late 1950s by Morgan Walker of DuPont and James Kelley of Remington Rand. A slip in any task on it pushes back the whole finish date.

Which organisation, established in 1969, publishes the PMBOK Guide and awards the PMP credential?

Project Management Institute founders included staff from McDonnell Douglas and Brown & Root. It held its first PMP exam in 1984, and by May 2020 over a million people held the credential.

In the PMBOK Guide, a standard reference for project managers since 1996, what does BOK stand for?

Body of Knowledge is the phrase. Earlier editions of the guide were recognised as formal standards by both the American standards organisation ANSI and the engineering society IEEE.

In WBS, the tree diagram that maps every deliverable in a project's scope, what does the B stand for?

Breakdown is the B in work breakdown structure. Its '100% rule' says the pieces must add up to all of the work in the project's scope, with nothing left out and no overlaps.

In a RACI chart, which maps who does what on a project, what does the letter A stand for?

Accountable marks whoever is individually and ultimately answerable for a task's success or failure. The other three letters stand for responsible, consulted and informed.

Which project document is a repository for every identified uncertainty, with its owner and mitigation measures?

Risk register entries record the nature of each risk, who owns it and how it will be handled. The finished list can be displayed as a simple table or as a scatterplot.

Project managers classically define a project as which kind of endeavour, creating a unique service or result?

Temporary is the key word: a project has an end, which sets it apart from business as usual, the repetitive and permanent activities that keep an organisation running.

In the PMBOK Guide, which document formally authorises a project and gives its manager authority over resources?

Charter is the word: a project charter is a short statement of scope, objectives and participants, and it also sketches out who will be responsible for what.

In scheduling, which term describes the time a task can slip without delaying a project's completion date?

Float comes in two kinds: total float protects the completion date, while free float is the delay a task can absorb before it holds up the tasks that follow it.

What one-word name do Agile teams give the chart that plots work left to do against time?

Burndown charts put outstanding work on the vertical axis and time along the horizontal. An 'ideal' straight line shows the pace needed to hit zero by the end date.

In Agile teams, which meeting closes each iteration by asking what went well and what could be improved?

Retrospective meetings hunt for ways to improve the process itself for the next round, and decide how both the successes and the fixes will be carried forward.

Which 1975 book by Fred Brooks argues that adding people to a late software project only makes it later?

The Mythical Man-Month draws on Brooks's time managing IBM's OS/360, where he added programmers to a slipping schedule and later concluded that it had delayed the work even further.

Which self-referential adage says a task always takes longer than expected, even allowing for the adage itself?

Hofstadter's law comes from Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book Gödel, Escher, Bach, where it explained why chess computers kept failing to beat top human players on anyone's timetable.

Which bias, proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979, makes people underestimate how long tasks take?

Planning fallacy was later widened by Kahneman and Lovallo to cover underestimating the costs of future actions while overestimating their benefits.

Which simulation method, used to model uncertainty in project schedules, was named after a famous casino?

Monte Carlo was chosen because mathematician Stanisław Ulam's uncle had a gambling habit. Ulam devised the modern method at Los Alamos while working on nuclear weapons.

Which US city opened its airport more than a year late in 1995 after its automated baggage system failed in tests?

Denver invited reporters to the first test in April 1994, where carts tossed luggage off the tracks. The airport ended up nearly $2 billion over budget, and the system was shut down in 2005.

Which Swedish warship, a management case study in poor communication, sank on its maiden voyage in 1628?

Vasa lay on the seabed of Stockholm harbour for 333 years before being raised in 1961. Management writers variously blame an absent king's constant meddling and poor communication between the parties involved.

Which project management method grew out of a 1989 UK government standard for information systems projects?

PRINCE2 descends from PRINCE, a name that originally stood for 'PROMPT II IN the CCTA Environment', after the government computing agency that adopted the earlier PROMPT II method.

Which electronics company introduced the Six Sigma quality method in 1986, led by engineer Bill Smith?

Motorola came first, but it was Jack Welch who made the method famous by putting it at the centre of General Electric's business strategy in 1995.

Which schedule compression technique shortens a project by throwing extra resources at the remaining tasks?

Crashing adds resources to finish sooner, while the other common technique, fast-tracking, saves time by performing tasks in parallel.

PERT, a scheduling technique made public in 1958, was created to support which US Navy missile project?

Polaris planners at the Navy's Special Projects Office created PERT with Lockheed and Booz Allen Hamilton. Unlike its sister technique CPM, it can use three time estimates for each activity.

Which measure, rooted in 1960s US defence contracts, prices a project's completed work at its budgeted cost?

Earned value is also called the budgeted cost of work performed. Set against the planned value and the actual spend, it shows whether a project is running ahead or behind.

In the MoSCoW method, requirements are ranked as must, should, could and which fourth category, the W?

Won't have is the W, covering items agreed to be left out this time round. Dai Clegg developed the method in 1994, and its two lower-case letters stand for nothing at all.

Which forecasting method, developed at Project RAND, polls a panel of experts anonymously over several rounds?

Delphi takes its name from the ancient Greek oracle, though the method's own authors disliked the label for 'smacking a little of the occult'.

Which woman oversaw construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after her husband, the chief engineer, fell ill?

Emily Roebling acted as liaison between her bedridden husband Washington and the site, and was the first to cross the finished bridge by carriage, carrying a rooster as a sign of victory.

Which US president lends his name to the matrix that sorts tasks by urgency and importance?

Dwight Eisenhower put it this way: 'The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.' He credited the insight to an unnamed former college president.