Does The Iron Triangle Fit The Agile Approach?

We all know the 3 main constraints of every project: scope, time, money where the scope is our vertex of the triangle. What will happen when we’ll inverse that?

Photo by Raul Petri on Unsplash

The Iron Triangle is a powerful and very helpful tool. It creates an understanding of what matters in every project and product. It helps explain to our stakeholders why some things cannot be done.

So a typical Iron Triangle looks like this

classic Iron Triangle

Typically we think about our projects and products like this.

I know what I want to build. Based on that knowledge I can predict how much it will cost and how long it will take.

This is something that we call a predictive approach. We want to PREDICT what will be done, how much it will cost, and how long it will take. We want to avoid any changes in the scope because it will affect our other dimensions (time and cost).

But what happens when we want to be more agile? How can we use that when we want to build an innovative product? It’s hard to predict the scope in such a…