The Iron Triangle of Project Management

As the tech world marches to the tune of Agile in some respects the discipline of Project Management has lost is lustre.  However, as in physics – an apple and a feather will really fall at the same rate in a vacuum – some of the principles are worth hanging on to. 

One case in point is the “Iron Triangle of Project Management”, the basis of which is that there are three competing constraints: Scope, Cost and Time. For the purposes of the iron triangle these are defined as follows:

Scope is the part of project planning that involves determining and documenting a list of specific project goals, deliverables, features & functions.

Cost is often defined in terms of resources, headcount but may include license or third party tools.

Time is simply the length of time to deliver.

Given an Agile context there is a clear challenge here as by definition the emphasis is on “working software over comprehensive documentation” and “responding to change over following a plan”. The constraints of the Iron Triangle seem much less appealing than the liberation of Agile.  The adaption of Enterprise agile provides solutions to this particular challenge however at this juncture all I wish to state is that within a Corporate context these constraints are real and there are consequences.

What are the consequences of breaking the Iron Triangle?

There are several ways of looking at this but the potential consequences are in terms of quality, security and people.  Whichever way you view security, as a subset of quality or discrete without doubt Quality and Security are compromised. People is felt in terms of the damage to their motivation and well being, which may not be seen in a single project but aggregated over multiple projects comes at a cost.