The Project Management Triangle Applied to What We Do

#ProjectManagment #scope #quality #time #costs

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In 1988, when I was busy with writing my thesis I needed to use a reference library (in Vienna, Austria) which was open to college students and "the public" only once per week, on Wednesdays from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m. Because the library's books were rare books, they were locked away; a clerk had to retrieve them from a backroom. To make things more complicated, the reference library’s books were never lent out but had to be read in the small reading room. 

Why do I still remember all of this, twenty-seven years later?

Because I lived through working with these constraints - every Wednesday - for many weeks. 

*

The clerk was an elderly lady who had a limp. To gather a dozen, typically heavy, reference books and bring them to the counter could take her twenty minutes. That meant, fifteen percent of the entire visitor time might be spent on waiting for her to deliver the books the first visitor requested.

If I wanted to proceed according to my plan, my time line, I simply could not allow any student to beat me to being the first person to receive books. So, I arrived every Wednesday an hour early, at 2:00 p.m. Sitting on the cold stone stairs in front of the door, I studied while I waited. On many Wednesdays, one or two other students arrived closer to 3:00 o’clock. If I saw the same student twice, the following week I made an effort of showing up even earlier. I figured that one of them would try to beat me.

As soon as I received the books, I leafed through them and inserted paper strips (sticky notes were not allowed) to mark the needed information. 

Promptly at 4:15 p.m., I began to copy all relevant pages. Copying was not a quick process; the library had posted procedures which needed to be followed. Wrinkling a page might get a student expelled. Each copy cost ten cents; adjusted for inflation, that would be 21 cents per copy today. Because I also worked I could afford copying every page I needed, other students had to copy by hand which delayed their progress.

*

These were the days when I learned the value of PROJECT MANAGEMENT and THOROUGH RESEARCH.

If I forgot to look up something, I had to wait an entire week to get access to the library again. If I did not check the page precisely before I copied it, I might come home and find out that the text was referring to other text printed on pages that I had not copied. Only once, at the beginning of my research, I had to ask the clerk to pull the same book a second time.


The project management triangle shows that we cannot execute projects of high quality also cheaply and quickly. At any given moment, at least one of the three cornerstones (scope/quality, time, costs) is a constraint. 

Though, typically, "costs" is the most common constraint, in this instance, my constraint was time  I could not access the library whenever I wanted or needed to; plus, I had to ensure that could make the complete two hours the library was open — per week, work for me. 

In short: While the quality of my thesis would always be the result of how much work I put into it, the “time I was able spend at the library” was the real constraint. 

The lesson learned from executing this project was far more valuable than what I learned about the topic of my thesis.


~~*~~


Gisela Hausmann dares to write what others' won't say or don't know. Her work has been featured in regional, national, and international publications including Success magazine and Entrepreneur, and on Bloomberg's podcast "Decrypted."

He latest book is "Winning @ Amazon."

Gisela tweets @Naked_Determina,
Her books are available at Amazon and other ebook retailers.

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© May 25, 2015 by Gisela Hausmann

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Comments

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