Have you heard of the Triple Constraint or the Iron Triangle in Project Management? If you are a project manager, the three most important things that you must always keep in mind are: Scope, Cost and Timeline- the three constraints that form the Iron Triangle. Impact lies in the centre of this triangle.
Efficient project managers think out of the box while defining the scope of a project, assigning timelines and estimating costs/ budget for projects. Once that is done, they form a mental box that has these three corners and start managing work accordingly. A critical thing to remember is that if one of these elements gets disturbed/ changed, the rest of the two are bound to change too. In short, altering one corner of the triangle would mean that the triangle no longer stays intact.
Let’s look at a yummy example to understand. On a Sunday afternoon, you decide to prepare lunch (The Project). After careful deliberation, you decide to cook Biryani (Scope) for which PKR X (Cost) needs to be spent on the ingredients, and the ingredients need to be procured before noon for the Biryani to be served for lunch at 1:30 pm (Time).
Now let’s assume the following scenario:You mistakenly procure ingredients for Nihari instead of Biryani (Change of Scope). Now, this would definitely mean that the same budget would not have been spent (Change of cost) and cooking Nihari would require a different amount of time as compared to Biryani (Change of Time).
Moral of the story: Altering one constraint of the iron triangle would affect the whole project.
So, while it’s super awesome to think out of the box while conceptualising projects and how you plan to execute them, it’s equally important to box your plans for better tracking and achievement of desired results.
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Hammad Abdul Mateen's Blog 