I just noticed this post by Michael Krigsman over at ZDNet's IT Project Failures blog linking to a post at OPENforum on "The Seven Laws of Projects, and How to Break Them." The post, and these laws, were formulated by Matthew May, author of "In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing." I haven't read the book, so I'm not sure if the Laws are articulated there or not; the book is apparently about the importance of elegant solutions in innovation, something of some familiarity to most of us in the IT world, where "elegant" programming is an aspiration shared by most developers.

As I went down the list, though, I was struck by the similarity of May's laws to those of John Gall, founder of the science of Systemantics and author of the movement's bible, "Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail." I doubt May was being so tongue in cheek when he formulated his laws but they have a similar sort of "funny because it's true" vibe to them. So I thought, hey, why restrict yourself to just seven? If you like May's rules for projects, you love Gall's rules of systems. You can find a long list of them compiled here on Wikipedia.