The Iron Triangle is Rusted

“Good, Fast, or Cheap. Pick two” is one of the most well-known phrases in Project Management. It’s also one of the most ignored. Nobody wants to hear that they can’t have quality, delivered on time, and under budget. Instead, we believe that we can outsmart the law; that if we’re clever enough, driven enough, and lucky enough the Iron Triangle won’t apply to us.

But the law always wins. Ignore it, and you will lose money, time, customers, employees, sleep, and hair. That’s because underneath this simple saying is a much deeper truth.

Let’s look at another triangle:

“Go Far, Get there Quickly, Move Slowly, pick two”. You should be able to convince yourself that if any two of those things are true that the third cannot be. This is a simple consequence of the three-way relationship between Distance, Speed, and Time. Each of them depends on the other two, so you cannot change one without changing at least one of the others. It doesn’t matter how clever you think you are, if you want to go further, its either going to take more time, or you’ll have to move faster.

It’s a very short leap from this triangle to one that applies more directly to Project Management:

“Get a Lot Done, Get it Done Fast, or Have an Ineffective Team. Pick two”. It’s very easy to see that if you have an ineffective team and you have a lot to do, it’s going to take a long time. If you have an ineffective team and you want things done quickly, you won’t be able to do very much. If you want to get a lot done quickly, you must have an effective team. Like the Distance, Speed, Time triangle, it’s not so much that you must pick two sides, but that each side depends on the other two.

This triangle is actually saying the same thing as the Iron Triangle, but it expresses its truth in a different way. The Iron Triangle makes it sound like a difficult decision between giving up one of three important things. When the market demands low prices and fast results, inevitably it is Quality that buckles. Our triangle, however, makes the decision seem like a no-brainer: You need an effective team, bar none.

The flaw of the Iron Triangle is that it puts the emphasis on cost. While there is surely a strong relation between cost and efficiency (as the best talent and the best tools tend to command the highest price), there is no guarantee that extra spending will give better results. Give a million dollars to an incompetent team, and you’ll get an incompetent team with money to spend. Give ten more employees to a leader who can’t manage five, and you’ll get a leader who can’t manage fifteen.

It’s easy to ignore efficiency, because it is by far the most difficult of the three sides to control. Setting a date is easy. Deciding how much work to do is more challenging but not unreasonable. Making your team work more effectively however, takes much more thought and effort. Productivity is a complicated mesh of having the right people, the right tools, and the right processes.

Nonetheless, you can ask yourself three very simple questions:

· Am I happy with how much work my team can accomplish?

· What have I done lately to improve productivity?

· How do I know it worked?

If you don’t have positive answers to these questions, you cannot succeed. As a leader, your only power will be in deciding whether to disappoint your customers by delivering too little, or delivering too late.