Triple Constraints of a project

Search & Analysis

To come up with a good project, the project manager has to be concerned about triple constraints. It helps to create a successful project.

According to Kathy Schwalbe Information Technology Project Management (6^th edition), triple constraints include of scope, time and cost. Scope includes of what work will be done as part of the project, what unique product, service or result does the customer or sponsor expect from the project, how will the scope be verified. Time is how long should it take to complete the project, what is the project’s schedule, how will the team track actual schedule performance, who can approve changes to the schedule. And cost is what should it cost to complete the project, what is the project budget, how will costs be tracked and who can authorize changes to the budget.

According to PMBOK (6^th edition), balancing the competing project constraints include scope, quality, schedule, budget, resources and risk. Changes can be happened if the relationship between these factors changed. If the team couldn’t get their targeted budget, then the scope and the quality will be low and the risk will be high. The risk can be negative or positive. Most of the projects fail, because of this unbalance of these constraints.

Conclusion

Comparing with these two, my suggestion is Kathy Schwalbe’s explanation is better than PMBOK explanation. Because Kathy has explained three constraints directly, so it is easy to balance. But in PMBOK they have come up with six factors but each meaning has similarities. Therefore using three constraints makes easier to detect as well as it is easy to understand and also it gives a big feedback on how to produce a good service or a product by combining and balancing these three constraints.

Reference

• NA, 2008, A Guide to the Project Management Body of  Knowledge, 4th ed, 14 Campus Blvd., Newton Square, PA 19073-3299 USA
• Kathy Schwalbe, Information Technology Project Management, 6th ed, USA