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Balancing 'TY' (Part 1)
As a senior program/project manager I spend most of my professional career in international program/project management, focusing on distributed projects in multi-cultural environments. People I work with recognize me for my ability to assess a situation quickly and define adequate and pragmatic actions to bring projects back on track. My style of management can be characterized as can-do, a pragmatic approach focusing on delivery.
The control parameters for a project are believed to be money and scope or functionality and time. I think this is only partly true: Functionality and time are control parameters, but money is not. Instead, productivity and quality are the two control parameters that replace money. These four parameters lead to the devil’s quadrant, which every project manager needs to understand:
Functionality, Time, Quality and Productivity
Or, in other words, how to balance “TY”. This article will explain why money is not a control parameter and how the control parameters influence one another.
Introduction
Quality and productivity replace money as the control parameter for projects. Whenever a budget is determined, it will be applied to allocate resources to the project. It is up to the project manager to decide if he prefers a limited number of senior resources, a number of junior resources--or a mixture of both. The choices made have an influence on the productivity of the project and an impact on the quality. With the same amount of money, different choices can be made and this will lead to a different type of project governance. Therefore money is not a control parameter, but the result of the weight given to the four control parameters.
The functionality and the duration of the project and time determine the amount of budget required. …
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