Two Never-Ending Project Management Wars

 

Also known as the “Triple Constraint,” the Iron Triangle is the idea that Scope, Cost, and Schedule are intricately linked, so that, for any given project, it’s impossible to change one while leaving the others as-is. A corollary axiom, “Quality, price, or availability: pick any two,” is an often-overlooked truism, but it drives wide sections of current management science, and can explain why there are never-ending conflicts in the Project Management realm.

War #1: The PM is never good enough.

This is particularly true in the realm of Government-sponsored projects, and is rooted in the strategy of awarding contracts to the lowest bidder. Returning to the “pick any two” rule, there are only three possible management approaches to a given project:

1. If it’s high-quality work, to be delivered on an aggressive schedule, it’s going to be expensive.
2. If it’s high-quality work, but at an “affordable” price, then the number of organizations capable of performing it as such are going to be few and far between. In other words, the customer will need to get in line.
3. If the project does not require high-quality work, there are probably many organizations capable of performing it, meaning that it can be done quickly and cheaply.

However, since the way Governments tend to let procurements is based on the lowest bidder, Approach #1 above has already been ruled out. It never fails: whichever of the remaining two advantages is pursued, the stakeholders invested in the one given short-shrift in the trade-off will complain long and loud. Even in those instances where the product or service being sought requires high quality and an aggressive schedule, criticisms will be levied about its costs being too high. It’s true of roads, defense, medical care – it’s generally impossible to deliver comparatively high-quality, affordable goods or services with a ready availability.

This is where the private sector has a real advantage. In the case of medical services, some companies can set up their business model for those who need immediate care at an affordable price, and staff their clinics with newly-minted doctors and nurses in modest facilities. Other hospitals can concentrate on specialized medicine, with advanced, experienced personnel who can keep prices reasonable because their clients don’t need immediate attention, and can typically wait for an appointment. Still others can charge a premium for those who need to see them immediately for complex problems, and all three of these business approaches can exist side-by-side, with the most successful ones being determined by the individual patients’ choices.

This is rarely the case in Government projects, which tend to impact broad sections of their constituents in such a way that other alternatives are excluded. It’s one of the reasons the practice of formal Project Management techniques is so crucial. Regardless of which two of the three preferred attributes are chosen, the precise relationship among Scope, Cost, and Schedule is locked in when the three baselines are “frozen,” and subject to formal change control. It’s a way of making sure everyone (appropriately) involved agrees on what’s being delivered, at what cost, and when, with claims of deceit or poor performance evaluated in terms of the already-agreed-to parameters.

But it’s also why some Project Managers will never escape accusations of failing some group of stakeholders. (It’s also why the push to “engage all stakeholders” is, I believe, profoundly misguided.)

War #2: Why we’ll never be free of Scope Creep

This war is similar to War #1, since it’s also based on the “pick any two” corollary. Once the project is underway, getting more or better goods or services is the only informally-negotiable member of the Iron Triangle left available. Lower costs are quantified in currency, and schedules depicted in days. But better quality can be requested in many circumstances where those parameters aren’t precisely captured, especially if the improved quality being sought is produced by the project team working harder or longer. Check almost any organization’s Strategic Vision or Corporate Values statement, and the word “quality” will almost always be there, since quality is usually far more difficult to precisely quantify than cost or schedule. One can make a claim to offer a quality good or service with more confidence of never being proved false than the claim of being a the lowest-priced, or fastest available. It’s in this very inchoate characteristic of quality management that those customers set on maximizing their “value” by attempting to informally increase the scope will take advantage, and even seasoned PMs are not invulnerable to them.

In other words, a customer who requests post-contract award a reduction in budget can be easily rebuffed, and the same goes for the customer who desires services or goods delivery sooner than negotiated. But the client who complains about inattention to quality will usually be seen on the side of enlightened management science, and, so positioned, will be next to impossible to contradict or refute.

With standards of living rising precipitously across the globe, I think it’s hilarious to hear some millennials talk about how they are going to “fix” the “mess” they’ve inherited from previous generations. But when it comes to the next generation of Project Managers, I believe they have a case if or when they assert that these two long-standing problems should have been addressed, if not out-and-out solved already.

That being said, they could also easily pass these two problems on to the next next generation of PMs, meaning that these two Project Management wars, among others, are possibly never-ending.