Title: Trade offs in project management - Project Management Questions
Headings: Trade offs in project management
Trade offs in project management
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Content: The decision to make a trade off is really based on the importance of each and every constraint. For example, some projects have a fixed deadline that is impossible to change, other projects may have a tight budget that they can never exceed, while the remaining projects have a scope that should never be altered. The importance of constraints depend on the type of the organization undertaking the project, the client, and the type of project. Now in every project, the importance of scope, cost, and time, is a number from 0 to 1, where the total of the importance of all the constraints is equal to 1. Let me give you an example so you can better understand, let's say you are constructing a tower for a very wealthy customer who places quality above anything else, and he wants the tower to be finished on time. The importance of scope I (S) will be 0.6, the importance of time I (T) will be 0.3, the importance of cost I (C) will be 0.1 (Total importance of constraints is 0.6+03+0.1 = 1). Now in the above example, let's say you discover that the marble used on the floor and in the bathrooms was below quality. The tradeoff that you make, since cost is of the lowest important, is to get better marble, and get more labor to replace the old marble with the new marble. Now let's look at another situation in the same example, you feel that your project is going to be late. Again, since cost is of little importance, then you add more labor to finish on time.