Long-live the Triangle!
Aaron Oliver points out that knowing about the “Pick two” triangle is not as much the issue as what people do with that obvious bit of knowledge.
The “triangle,” if you are wondering, is a regular triangle with three named corners: Good, Cheap, Fast. Quite often, when faced with unreasonable demands, project managers/team leaders will draw this triangle on a white board/sheet of paper/paper napkin and ask their management to “pick two” because honestly it’s the best you can realistically get.
Sometimes, freelancers try that as well; often ends up with more unemployed freelancers. People do kill the messenger.
I find only one flaw with Aaron’s post: granted, grade-school students understand this thing. And so do your management/customers. Unfortunately this is irrelevant: their own management applies enough pressure on them that all they can do is look at your drawing and nod in agreement and ask in the very next sentence what can be done do “get all three.”
It’s like when using CMMI: one of the first things you need to do is to decide whether, for your project, schedule is the most important criteria, or whether features scope is.
It’s almost 100% certain that you will find, months in the project, that the most important criteria is the one that’s behind:
- If you selected schedule and now need to kill a couple features to meet your deadlines, marketing will most likely point out that the project is doomed without these features.
- If you had agreed on features being the driving factor and need a couple extra months to deliver them, then…well, why don’t you give it a try and let me know how that went for you?
So, yes, the triangle is a bit obnoxious. And no, if you’re an engineer, it’s very likely that your management does not need to see it once again. But the problem lies mostly with the stakeholders: management’s management, marketing, other groups/units. These are the ones who need to be regularly reminded that “it’s not so simple.”
Because the more stakeholders the project has, the more likely they are to behave irrationally. That’s how we are wired to cope with external pressure.
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