Whenever it comes to managing projects, every team requires some sort of motivation to get going and to stay on track.
It’s quite human to lose focus when you’re faced with unrealistic deadlines (let’s just admit, deadlines are always unrealistic – well, most of the time) and the impending fear of failure. It’s at this point that you need a solid shot of inspiration to instantly regain your focus.
Each one of us has our own way of getting inspired. For some, inspiration is derived from peers, influencers, inspirational podcasts, while some others (like us) turn to famous project management quotes to get their daily dose of inspiration.
If you’re someone who always looks up to famous people and their sayings, look no further as we’ve sieved through hundreds of top project management quotes and cherry-picked the classics for you to stay productive.
Enjoy!
1. Project Planning
One of the first steps of starting any project is devising a powerful project plan. The significance of a project plan is evident from these sayings:
1. “Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning.” – Winston Churchill
2. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” – Peter Drucker
3. “Have a good plan, Execute it violently, Do it today” – General Douglas McArthur
4. “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the face” – Mike Tyson
5. “It’s a bad plan that admits of no modification.” – Publilius Syrus
6. “Plans are worthless. Planning is essential.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
7. “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” – John F. Kennedy
8. “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” – Thomas Edison
9. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” – Abraham Lincoln
10. “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” – Alexander Graham Bell
11. “Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.” – Margaret Thatcher
Check this out:
9 Best Project Management Tools and Resource Scheduling Software to Improve Teams
2. Team Communication
Effective communication plays a key role when it comes to dealing with excessive layers of project details, information exchange, and decisions that need to be timely implemented. These quotes illustrate how important communication is for projects:
12. “Of all the things I’ve done, the most vital is coordinating the talents of those who work for us and pointing them toward a certain goal.” – Walt Disney
13. “As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own.” – Amy Poehler
14. “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
15. “Effective communication is 20% what you know and 80% how you feel about what you know.” – Jim Rohn
16. “Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell
17. “The art of communication is the language of leadership.” – James Humes
18. “Politeness is the poison of collaboration.” – Edwin Land
19. “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can’t get them across, your ideas won’t get you anywhere.” – Lee Iacocca
20. “The fewer people know, the more they yell.” – Seth Godin
21. “Words should be used as tools of communication and not as a substitute for action.” – Unknown
3. Teamwork
Teams just don’t work without teamwork and the following project management quotes prove it:
22. “In teamwork, silence isn’t golden, it’s deadly.” – Mark Sanborn
23. “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford
24. “Individual commitment to a group effort-that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi
25. “None of us is as smart as all of us.” – Ken Blanchard
26. “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” – H.E. Luccock
27. “The main ingredient of stardom is the rest of the team.” – John Wooden
28. “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
29. “It takes both sides to build a bridge.” – Fredrik Nael
30. “No matter how brilliant your mind or strategy, if you’re playing a solo game, you’ll always lose out to a team.” – Reid Hoffman
31. “Teamwork is the secret that makes common people achieve uncommon results.” – Ifeanyi Enoch Onuoha
32. “Teamwork makes the dream work.” – John C. Maxwell
4. Failure
Projects fail. At one point or another during your project, you will be faced with failures and that’s when you need these quotes to get back on track:
33. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
34. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill
35. “There are no failures – just experiences and your reactions to them.” – Tom Krause
36. “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” – Kim Robinson
37. “Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.” – Robert Kiyosaki
38. “Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
39. “You get paid in direct proportion to the difficulty of problems that you solve.” – Elon Musk
40. “Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.” – Henry Ford
41. “Man cannot discover new oceans unless he has the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide
42. “In the real world, the smartest people are people who make mistakes and learn. In school, the smartest people don’t make mistakes.” – Robert Kiyosaki
43. “There’s nothing like biting off more than you can chew, and then chewing it anyway.” – Mark Burnett
44. “An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.” – Reid Hoffman
5. Project Management
Now putting out some perspectives about the discipline itself:
45. “No major project is ever installed on time, within budget, with the same staff that started it.” – Edwards, Butler, Hill, and Russell
46. “No matter how good the team or how efficient the methodology, if we’re not solving the right problem, the project fails.” – Woody Williams
47. “Operations keep the lights on, strategy provides the light at the end of the tunnel, but project management is the train engine that moves the organization forward” – Joy Gumz
48. “A project is complete when it starts working for you, rather than you working for it.” – Scott Allen
49. “Being a Project Manager is like being an artist, you have the different colored process streams combining into a work of art.” – Greg Cimmarrusti
50. “Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That’s what management is all about.” – Tom DeMarco
51. “Trying to manage a project without project management is like trying to play a football game without a game plan” – K. Tate
52. “Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised.” – Denis Waitley
53. “The “P” in PM is as much about ‘people’ management as it is about ‘project’ management.” – Cornelius Fichtner
54. “Nothing is less productive than to make more efficient what should not be done at all.” – Peter Drucker
55. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” – Peter F. Drucker
6. Deadlines
What are projects without deadlines? Deadlines that are a nightmare for most of project managers, play an important role in mapping out the project timeline and deciding the next course of action. How critical deadlines are can be understood from these quotes:
56. “Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.” – Peter Drucker
57. “There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic deadlines.” – Brian Tracy
58. “Beware the time-driven project with an artificial deadline.” – Michael S. Dobson
59. “How does a project get to be a year late? One day at a time.” – Frederick Brooks
60. “Projects progress quickly until they become 90% complete; then remain at 90% complete forever.” – Edwards, Butler, Hill, and Russell
61. “It is useless to desire more time if you are already wasting what little you have.” – James Allen
62. “Goals are dreams with deadlines.” – Diana Scharf
63. “You may con a person into committing to an unreasonable deadline, but you cannot bully them into meeting it.” – Edwards, Butler, Hill, and Russell
64. “You may delay, but time will not.” – Benjamin Franklin
65. “Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.” – Henry Ford
66. “Lavish credit on anyone and everyone who helped you the least bit.” – Tom Peters
67. “Rewards and motivation are an oil change for project engines. Do it regularly and often.” – Woody Williams
68. “Be candid with everyone.” – Jack Welch
7. Humorous/Funny
Project management doesn’t always have to be serious, and we have some funny project management quotes on the matter to prove us right 😉
69. “If everything seems to be going well, you obviously don’t know what’s going on.” – Edward Murphy
70. “We build systems like the Wright brothers built the airplanes; build the whole thing, push it off a cliff, let it crash and start all over again.” – R.M Graham
Funny Project Management Quotes and Comics by Dilbert
Love comics by Dilbert? We do too! Here are 3 of our top picks for Project Management quotes:
This marks the end of our compilation of top project management quotes. Let us know in the comments if they were a source of inspiration or amusement for you.