My favorite blog post to date. Thank you for taking the time to write it. I thought I would add one of my favorites.

“This functionality is working as designed” – Perhaps it is working as designed, but maybe the design is broken!

“This time line is aggressive” – If you are using these words, you might want to rethink your time line.

“I want it to work like the old system” – Why are you implementing SAP?

“This guy cost less” – Perhaps your consultant selection criteria needs to be expanded.

“That is not what I wanted” – Is that not your approval signature in the corner.

“We need to consult one of our experts” – You mean to say you didn’t staff my project with people that can get the job done?

“Let me get back to you on that” – This is consultant speak for I have no idea how to answer that questions. The thing that separates the good consultants from the bad ones is as follows: A good one figures it out and gets back to you. A bad one just hopes you are too buried to remember to ask that question again.

“We are working on the project plan” – By itself it is not much of a cliche. However when used repeatedly on a project it becomes a cliche.

Thank you Patrick for statements like “Just so I’m not surprised when it happens, what other things happen on every project that I should know about?”, and not a cliche but one of my favorites “That train has sailed”.

Thanks again Tim.

Tim

I have a few phrases to contribute:

“9 women do not make a baby in 1 month”
“If standard do not do it, probably you should think over and change your current process”
“may not be very user friendly, but think it over more than 10,000 of worlwide best companies cannot be wrong”
“sooner or later you will have to use all SAP terminology, better soon than later”
“In the old days we use to call it HR today it is HCM ”

there are a lot of more phrases, as soon as I remember more I’ll write it back !

Cheers !