One of the fundamental concepts of Project Management (PM) is the Project Constraints Model. Three key constraints, time, cost & scope, impact the resulting quality.
Time: Amount of time spent
Cost: Amount of money spent
Scope: Range of things to do
With a given amount of Time, Cost & Scope, the result would be a given Quality. What this means is that if any of these are reduced, the resulting quality will also be reduced.
But this doesn’t sound very promising, does it? We want to maintain the same level of quality with less time, cost or scope. Alternatively, increase quality with the same time, cost and scope.
Don’t worry — there are many ways that this can be done!
- Reduce unnecessary quality
- Improve time efficiencies
- Improve cost efficiencies
- Improve scope efficiencies
Reduce Unnecessary “Quality”: Wrinkle-Free Underwear?
Is higher quality necessarily better?
For example, if we were to look at doing the laundry, having nicely ironed clothes might be considered a higher quality outcome than wrinkly clothes right out of the dryer. But what about underwear? Is an ironed underwear more desirable than one that is not? I assume that if you are like my family, although you might be impressed seeing such high-quality work, you probably would not need it. I can just imagine the whining by whoever is assigned the task, “why in the world would anyone need their undies ironed?!”
In such cases, lower quality might not necessarily be a bad thing. It isn’t wrong to do more than is required, but if you are a busy family, focusing your time, money, and energy on more important things would make more sense.
I will talk about the time/cost/scope efficiencies in upcoming notes.
