You Can’t Have It All!

One of the common causes of project failures is that the project sponsor demands that the project manager must finish the job by a certain time, within budget, at a given magnitude or scope, while achieving specific performance levels. In other words, the sponsor dictates all four of the project constraints. This doesn’t work.

The relationship between the PCTS constraints can be written as follows:

In words, this says, “Cost is a function of Performance, Time, and Scope.” Graphically, I like to show it as a triangle, in which P, C, and T are the sides and S is the area. This is shown in Figure 1-1.

In geometry, we know that if we are given values for the sides of a triangle, we can compute the area. Or, if we know the area and two sides, we can compute the length of the remaining side. This translates into a very practical rule of project management: The sponsor can assign values to any three variables, but the project manager must determine the remaining one.

So let’s assume that the sponsor requires certain performance, time, and scope from the project. It is the project manager’s job to determine what it will cost to achieve those results. However, I always caution project managers that they should have a paramedic standing by when they give the cost figure to the sponsor because she will probably have a stroke or heart attack, and the paramedic must revive her.

Invariably, the sponsor exclaims, “How can it cost that much?” She had a figure in mind, and your number will always exceed her figure. And she may say, “If it’s going to cost that much, we can’t justify doing the job.” Exactly! And that is the decision she should make. But she is certain to try to get the project manager to commit to a lower number, and if you do, then you only set up yourself—and her—to take a big fall later on.

It is your obligation to give the sponsor a valid cost so that she can make a valid decision about whether the project should be done or not. If you allow yourself to be intimidated into committing to a lower number, it is just going to be a disaster later on, and you are far better off to take your lumps now than to be hung later on.

Of course, there is another possibility. If she says she can only afford so much for the job, then you can offer to reduce the scope. If the job is viable at that scope level, then the project can be done. Otherwise, it is prudent to forget this project and do something else that can make profits for the company. As someone has said, there is a higher probability that things will accidentally go wrong in a project than that they will accidently go right. In terms of cost estimates, this means that there is always a higher likelihood that the budget will be overrun than that the project will come in below budget. This is just another way of stating Murphy’s law, that “whatever can go wrong will go wrong.”

There is a higher probability that things will accidentally go wrong in a project than that they will accidentally go right.