Can I Offer You Some Feedback? - Episode #54
Show Notes:
This week Sara delivers a bite about Project Management constraints. Scope, Cost and Schedule. The idea is that all three triple constraints can not co-exist when trying to have a successful project. It’s important to make choices about what elements are most important. Sara introduces additional options to consider like risks, resources and quality. Subscribe today so you never miss an episode!
Below we are offering a transcript of the podcast for accessibility and reference.
Episode #54: Business Bites: project management constraints
Welcome to Business Bites. My name is Sara. This is the podcast for busy professionals who want the quick hits of business terminology, historical context, and strategies for integration. This week, we're going to be talking about project management constraints, sometimes referred to as triple constraints.
When you first learn about project management, you hear the idea of triple constraints, that there's scope, cost, and schedule. So the trick with these constraints, and the reason that we call them constraints, is that we need to have a careful balance of which ones we're going to prioritize. You can't have something that has a very large scope and not also think about cost and time. Or if you want something done quickly, you can't just make it be cheaper, or you might need to reduce the scope. Similarly, with cost and or time, you do need to decide upfront which of these elements is most important to you, and determine that up front. before you've gone in too deep.
And thinking about each of these constraints, it's important for the project team to determine which of the ones, either time, scope, or cost, is most important to us. If we aren't careful about our scope, we could have scope creep, where we end up adding additional things on that may put the whole project at risk.
If we're not monitoring cost, then we could have an issue with budget overruns or other challenges in being able to get the equipment we need, or the people involved in the project. Time, of course, has a huge element as a part of any part of project management. If we can't stick to a timeline, then we won't be able to get other initiatives done as well.
Other than the triple constraints that we most commonly hear of, again, scope, cost, and schedule, I do want to encourage you to think about three other areas that should be incorporated into your triple constraints. Thinking about risk, resources, and quality. I've recently adopted this six constraint model as a way to thinking about project management because I don't think we can just forget these other three.
When we're talking about risk, it's important to acknowledge what happens if we stretch our resources, or we don't have clarity, or if we find that performance is lacking, or we haven't actually answered questions about the risk inherent to the project. If we aren't thinking about resource allocation, perhaps we have limited equipment, or software, or potentially computer bandwidth, and of course, the most important resource the people.
I often find that with large projects and organizations, they keep pulling on the same people to work on every single initiative. When you pull on the same people all the time, they're going to get tired. And so when we're thinking about actually executing on projects, you may need to think about the resources that are impacted by all the different initiatives.
The last is the quality. I've never met a group that's been okay with producing okay quality. We want to make sure that whatever the project deliverables are, we're meeting those objectives, and we're doing it in a consistent way that produces what we want each time. Now, quality issues aren't necessarily related to cost or resources or even potentially scope, and sometimes are assumed as a part of what a project may be working on.
It's important, therefore, for the whole group to talk about which of the constraints is most important, which we're going to prioritize, and which we are going to invest the most time, energy, and potentially money into to ensure that it doesn't fail. If you fail to manage your constraints, then you may have an overall project failure.
This has been Sara with Business Bites. You can reach me at podcast@mod.network. We would love to hear from you on what other terminology you'd like bite-sized. And as always, you can give us a quick rating on your platform of choice and share this podcast with a friend. We'll see you next time.
Further Reading: