Does this conversation sound familiar?
The second and third frames are the exact words sent to me by a team member last week. It’s great to see team members coming up with new ways to explain a sometimes frustrating reality of every project: the triple constraint. Every project faces the limits of scope, time, and cost. The project manager needs to remind the team and stakeholders of every project about this, often several times throughout the project. “You can have it good, you can have it fast, or you can have it cheap. Pick two.” By “good”, we mean not necessarily good as in quality, but good as in comprehensive.
The team working on one of my projects is smart, hard-working, enthusiastic, and committed to quality. We have been allotted some money to complete the project, which takes care of the budget part. However, what started as a relatively simple objective has turned into a quest for perfection. In order to do it perfectly, we would need to continue for many months, with many stops and starts. No one has that kind of time— that is, the schedule part. So in order to finish before the end of the century, we have decided to rein in the scope by cutting out some steps for future projects.
The result of the project will be not cheap, but relatively inexpensive. And in order to finish on time, the outcome will be very good—just not perfect. And that’s OK, as Voltaire reminded us when he said: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
The best news in all this is that the team “gets it”. Managing the triple constraint is indeed a team effort!