The Project Pyramid
| I've long been fascinated by the now famous "scope, resources, timepick any two" paradigm, which states that trying to maximize scope while simultaneously minimizing resources and time will impose too many constraints and inevitably lead to project failure. Max Wideman talks about "the iron triangle" on his excellent website on project management wisdom, www.maxwideman.com.[1]
Max makes the important point that we need to add a critical fourth dimensionqualityto the paradigm. As he wrote to me, Interestingly, quality ultimately transcends all else, whether in terms of performance, productivity, or final product. But a remarkable number of people in the project management industry don't seem to have latched onto that. Who cares if last year's project was late and over budget? That's all lost in last year's financial statements. But the quality [of the product] is enduring. It is hard to argue with that point of view. Most of us software developers can recall some time when, in our zeal to make our commitments and ship on time, we let stuff get out the door that caused us heavy regrets later on. So Max extends the iron triangle to a star, as shown in Figure 9.1. Figure 9.1. Max Wideman's extension of the "iron triangle"resources, scope, and timeintroduces "quality" as a fourth element.
As an alternative to this star, Max's correspondent Derrick Davis suggests using a tetrahedron to illustrate these relationships. This allows you to maintain the original triangle but create a third dimension to depict the quality aspect. The nice thing about the tetrahedron is its intrinsic symmetry; the four attributes populate the vertices, and any three can be used as the base. Max has illustrated this in a thoughtful way, tying the vertex pairs together with another descriptor (see Figure 9.2). Figure 9.2. The tetrahedron model allows any three attributes to serve as a base, placing the fourth attribute into the third dimension.
|
EAN: N/A
Pages: 269