Confessions of a Project Manager

The science of project management is commonly defined by the Iron Triangle: a triangle whose sides represent project scope, time, and resources (or cost). The concept is analogous to Newton’s Third Law of Motion which states that any time a force acts from one object to another, there is an equal force acting back on the original object. Whenever you add something to one of the sides of the triangle, for example, scope, there must be a corresponding expansion that occurs to one or both of the other sides of the triangle such as increased time or cost. (Of course the inverse applies too when you reduce the scope, but that’s not a scenario we see too often). Project managers are trained to tell their clients: “Pick any two.”  For instance, if time and cost are your most important factors, your scope may have to adjust to align with those priorities.

So that’s how the triangle works. How beautifully logical and scientific you say! Many a project manager instinctively latches on to this concept as the quintessential answer to keeping projects under control, expecting the client will see it the same way. Isn’t it obvious?!

Yes, logically and conceptually it is obvious, but therein lies the catch. First of all, what in life is ever that simplistic and clear cut? And when is there a project that’s not messy and complex? That’s right, nothing and never, respectively. Project managers must work within the rules of the Iron Triangle, but those rules, like any others, are dependent on their context – situations and issues specific to the project and external factors outside of the project. Project managers must respect and follow the rules, while at the same time being flexible, adaptable and creative in balancing stakeholders with multiple agendas, prioritizing competing priorities, and steadfastly keeping the web team and client teams working together toward the greater project good.

To be sure, the sides of the Iron Triangle represent the easy-to-quantify metrics of project management and remain useful for managing risks. However, the “special sauce” of project management is not the ability to track the budget, monitor the timeline and manage resources. Rather, it’s about successfully performing the balancing act. This is why the job of a project manager more often feels like an art than a science. A recent article in CIO describes Six Attributes of Successful Project Managers: foresight, organization, leadership, communication, pragmatism and empathy. As the author points out, these not-so-quantifiable traits are critical to consistently executing and delivering successful projects on time and on budget, but they are not obvious success factors for cost effectively managing projects if you’re only concerned with the three sides of the Iron Triangle.

The Iron Triangle serves as a particularly bad analogy for a web project. First, the triangle concept is missing a key element: quality. Some might argue that quality is a function of scope (how much you can get done, and how thoroughly you can do it), but I’d argue it’s equally a function of resources (how well you do it, which depends critically on who’s doing it, what process and practices they apply to the task, and how much money you have to throw at it). Quality also hinges on time (last minute work looks like, well, that it was done at the last minute). Quality is like the environment, an externality not calculated in traditional economic theories of supply and demand. But quality comes at a cost and is not an inferior measure of the project’s success and the client’s satisfaction.   Max Wideman has proposed re-configuring the Triangle to include quality like so:

Taken from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/4291.html

Glenn Alleman expresses project management as a Spider Graph, which he prefers as an archetype because project management includes multiple variables and requires a conceptual model that can accommodate them.

Taken from http://herdingcats.typepad.com/my_weblog/2006/04/iron_triangles_.html

Second, as for the “iron” part of the concept, it conveys something that is heavy and unyielding. This is antithetical to the nature of fast moving web projects, where the only thing you can count on is that changes will happen and, when they do, you have to be flexible, adaptable and creative.

Scott Ambler has written about the benefits of agile development, which is premised on incorporating quality processes into building software through faster iterations and active stakeholder participation to ensure an excellent product.

Mike Cottmeyer, of Leading Agile, encourages PMs to “flip the script” and think about our jobs from the perspective of the vision rather than the plan.

Taken from http://www.leadingagile.com/2008/04/inverting-iron-triangle.html

Although there isn’t one diagram that encapsulates the perfect measures of a successful web project, they all recognize – and I concur – that the iron triangle is getting a little bit rusty.