You may have heard of the “Iron Cross”.
- Good (Quality)
- (Delivered) Fast
- Cheap (Under budget)
- (Everything) Done
Focus on any three you like, but you can’t have the fourth.
You can have a project that is good quality, delivered on time fast, and within budget and cheap. But! not everything will get done.
Or, you can have a project that is all done, cheap, and fast, but it won’t be good quality.
These things are variables. The team needs to determine just how good, how fast, how cheap, and how done the project should be and tweak the variable knobs.
Good project management means being aware of these variables and in control of the variable knobs. Bad project management is denying that these variables even exist and just assuming they’ll all be maxed out.