With information technologies' pervasive use within all departments and by all staff, libraries and library staff get their fair share of mandated projects. Knowing how to successfully operate in this kind of environment is important to the overall success of the library as a whole. What is meant by mandated project? A mandated project is a project in which some outside organization or entity requires one to fundamentally change, upgrade, or modify an operation, program, or function that is working fine, however flawed, outdated, or imperfect it may be. All kinds of projects fall into this mandated project variety, not just IT-type projects, although those are the most common ones when thinking about this issue. Because of the pace of change and how pervasive IT is to an organization, these IT projects happen more often and can have more far-reaching effects to a systems librarian's job or to the library as an organization. To minimize the impact of the experiences, one can apply the seven principles outlined in this article as he/she works through a mandated project.