Inspired by Don Carman’s Reporter Responses, a handy list for the IT professional:
- Good, fast, cheap — pick two.
- It’s not a show-stopper.
- It’s a show-stopper.
- It’s out of scope.
- It’s not rocket science.
- It’s not brain surgery.
- Let’s not reinvent the wheel.
- That sounds doable.
- I could do it myself in a week.
- That’s why I make the big money.
- It works fine on my machine.
- It was working fine 10 minutes ago.
- It’s a best-of-breed solution.
- It’s an enterprise-class solution.
- It’s a state-of-the-art solution.
- It’s an industry standard.
- It’s a best practice.
- It’s not one of our core competencies.
- We’re waiting on requirements.
- We’re waiting on design.
- We’re waiting on the vendor.
- We found some issues in testing.
- We’re thinking outside the box.
- Add that to the lessons learned.
- That’s a ballpark estimate.
- I’m working smarter, not harder.
- There are no problems, only opportunities.
- Since when did you become an expert on ____?
- I know you are but what am I?
- I can’t explain that to my boss.
- I’ll get to it next week.
- We’ll make up the lost time in testing.
- It has to go through change control.
- We moved that to the next release.
- I’ll clean that up later.
- It’s pretty much done.
- It’s 90 percent done.
- It’s done, except for the testing.
- It’s just a one-line fix.
- We have to rewrite it from scratch.
- That’s a training issue.
- That’s not really an issue.
- Have you tried calling the help desk?
- We’re in discovery on that.
- We would have been all right, but the requirements kept changing.
- We have to follow the standard process.
- Let’s do a gap analysis.
- It’s a team effort.
- This business has really changed.