Schedule Slippage

Zack Urlocker
Monday, June 10, 2002

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Even the most conservative project schedules usually end up slipping. But if your management is like most, they're probably sick of hearing the same old excuses. So with that in mind, here's our Top 10 Excuses you can use to explain why your project slipped.

10. It took a couple of weeks to get the Feng Shui just right in the user interface.

9. We found an Atari Emulator for Linux and decided to re-write Centipede in C++.

8. The documentation needed to be translated from Japanese to German to English.

7. The QA team camped out for 3 weeks to get tickets to the new Star Wars movie.

6. We would have shipped sooner but management made us write a spec.

5. They released the complete Dr. Who series on DVD.

4. It turns out that Chinese really is a different language from Japanese.

3. We decided to use Java and had to write our own class library. And database. And debugger.

2. It took two weeks to reclassify all the bugs as features.

1. The cleaning crew erased the whiteboard with all the UML diagrams on it.

About the author
Zack Urlocker is a pseudonym for a Silicon Valley software executive.