Making choices in projects and in life

A while back I worked as a programmer for a retail software outfit that is no longer in business. Its name lives on as an Amazon storefront, but the original model it used to sell product couldn’t survive the ubiquity of the PC.

But that’s a story for another post. I bring it up here because it was at this company I was first exposed to a concept that is now commonly used in project management.

One of my coworkers laid the concept this way, on a whiteboard outside his cubicle: “You can have it fast, you can have it right, you can have it cheap. Pick any two”. Think about this for a moment, and relate it to just about anything on your to-do list. If it must be done fast, and must be done right, it will likely be expensive (example: your furnace fails at 11:00 p.m. on the night before your extended family shows up for Thanksgiving). If you want it done right and it must be done cheap, it’s going to take a while (example: growing your own vegetables). If you must have it fast and cheap, the end product will probably be less than ideal (example: the Happy Meal).

This is commonly referred to as the “Magic Triangle”, and it basically says that in any project there are tradeoffs between these three variables and that those tradeoffs must be known and accepted by all stakeholders.

The Magic Triangle

We can think of some examples where time and cost are not constraints to a quality output, but they are few and far between. If my father-in-law (ret.) wants to build a bookshelf, for instance, he can take as long as he wants. And assuming that he doesn’t want it festooned with gold leaf, he can choose whatever building materials suit him because nothing that he would typically build a bookshelf out of is cost prohibitive. The result is a really, really nice display for trinkets (because nobody reads books anymore, do they?) that will last a lifetime.

Much more common is to choose which of these three constraints is the most important and then make decisions around that choice. For leaders, this is a crucial conversation to have at the beginning of a project so that all stakeholders agree on the most important criteria to drive delivery. What is the one thing that can’t change? Is it budget (cost), schedule (time), or scope (quality)? Don’t let this question go unasked, or unanswered, and be prepared to trot out the agreement later on when one of your project stakeholders refuses to let the schedule slip and demands additional tasks be delivered without more budget (called “scope creep”).

As you can see, even though this is called the Magic Triangle there is nothing magic about it. It gives you a way to explicitly consider tradeoffs and decide the criteria for project success. It will also make your team think about whether it really is or is not critical to meet the proposed schedule, or whether a requirement for zero defects is necessary or puffery. The most important point about the Magic Triangle is that it describes physical constraints. Stakeholders with integrity will accept that rather than accuse you of offering a preemptive excuse for failure to deliver.

The Magic Triangle works at home, too. Use it sometime when the family doesn’t agree about a fundamental choice (like a big screen TV or vacation plans). Having everyone be clear about the relative importance they put on time, money and quality should prompt some very interesting and very open discussions.