Project Trade-offs:

Scope, Duration, Cost

By Dick Billows, PMP, GCA

Projects are like a tube of toothpaste. When an executive squeezes on a project’s duration by cutting the due date by a month, the toothpaste oozes out one of the other corners to compensate. When you squeeze duration, the project will deliver less scope, cost more, or have a higher risk of failure. 

 How to make trade-offs to scope, budget and duration

 Step #

 Responsibility of:

 Actions to Take:

1

Project manager

The foundation for being able to develop alternative combinations of scope, budget and duration is to build a best practices project plan and schedule. The requirements are that every deliverable and every task in the WBS be defined as a deliverable, not an activity, and have quantified acceptance criteria. That way there’s no ambiguity about the state of progress or the completion.
The project plan and schedule also need to be based on work estimates, not just start and finish dates. With those components in place, the project manager is positioned to offer the sponsor and decision-makers  alternatives and trade-offs between scope, budget and duration.

2

Project manager during project plan presentation

During the initial presentation of the project plan, the project manager models at least three alternative ways of doing the project. Starting from the base design, the project manager constructs three alternatives to finish at least 20% earlier than the base design. The project manager also constructs three alternatives that collectively lower the cost of the project by 20%.  Having these options available during the project presentation gives the project manager the ability to answer the question that so often is asked which is "How can we do this cheaper and faster?"

3

Project manager when there are variances in the weekly status report

The project manager uses trade-offs to model alternative corrective actions to correct the variances.

4

Project manager when dealing with change requests

When the project manager assesses the impact of a change request on the project we always consider the impact on scope, cost and duration as well as trade-offs between those three constraints.