From the broadest perspective, project management is the set of practices employed to achieve the goals of the project within a given set of constraints. While this definition likely jives with a layperson’s understanding of how projects are managed, it’s not until you really dive into types of constraints, inputs, and outputs that the value of project management methodologies can really shine forth.
Firstly, what are the project constraints? Scope, time, quality, and budget are the four traditional constraints on a project. If you’ve ever heard the old adage “pick two: quick, affordable, high quality,” that sums up the common conundrum of balancing project constraints. But all popular project management methodologies provide even more than a way to segment priorities. The concept of scope provides a catch-all in which one can ascertain what actions are necessary (and how necessary) in the first place.
Generally speaking, project scope involves gathering information needed to start a project, and ascertaining what features or outcomes of a project are needed to meet stakeholder expectations. Scope can be further divided into two component parts: product scope and project scope. Project scope is concerned with the “hows” of how work will get done to achieve goals. Product scope is concerned with the “whats,” as in what functional requirements are needed for a project to be a success. One of the most useful contributions of defining, documenting, and tracking project scope is through avoidance of project requirement scope creep. Scope creep refers to changes or growth in the original scope of the project such that objectives unneeded, non-critical, or unwanted are being pursued under the name of the project. Scope creep is one of the largest sources of waste in many organizations.
Time is one of the most straightforward of the project management constraints. Often phrased in terms of business cycles (quarterly, annually, monthly, so forth), time is the amount of time in which a project needs to achieve core goals to be deemed a success. Additionally, time links up with the budget constraint, as time relates to the amount of work time key players on a team spend, making the project cost more or less depending on how time is allocated.
Budget in project management is defined as the amount of money that would be acceptable to achieve certain goals. With that said, many projects go over budget, and thus processes must be put in place for reassessing what costs may be justifiable to continue a project to completion (or some acceptable state of completion).
Quality is the state of creating a product or process viewed as non-inferior to expectations. This is a somewhat subjective measure, and often ascertained through stakeholder meetings or reviews.
Assessments of quality gain greater specificity and objectivity as projects are completed in spaces where peer projects may be used as comparison. For example, if a product is the first of its kind, there will likely be less measures as to its quality. If a product has many competitors, quality may be measurable in terms of whether the product produces outcomes or experiences of higher quality than peer products.
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