Fast - cheap - good - you can have any two 

Author: Stephen Lake

Many Projects are Structured to fail from the Start

One of the common causes of project failures is that the project sponsor demands that the project manager finish the job by a certain time, within budget, and at a given magnitude or scope, while achieving specific performance levels.  In other words, the sponsor dictates all four of the project constraints.  This doesn’t work.

The relationship between the components of a project can be written as follows: C = f(P,T,S) ¹

In words, this says, “Cost (C) is a function of Performance (P), Time (T) and Scope (S).

This translates into a very practical rule of project management:  The sponsor can assign values to any three variables, but the project manager must determine the remaining one.

The Balancing Trick

Common sense tell us you cannot “have your cake and eat it too”.  In any project there are tradeoffs.

The project will have developed with some pre-conceptions:

• The amount of money available (budget)
• What you want to achieve (objectives)
• The return on investment you want the
  project to deliver (value)
• The standard of the deliverables (quality)
• What the organisation will consider
  successful (stakeholder’s satisfaction)
• How long it will take (timeframe).

You will only succeed if you clearly determine at the start the organisation’s relative prevailing position on each of these variables.  This “negotiation” should be completed before any detailed planning begins.

¹ Source: Fundamentals of Project Management - James P Lewis