Many software development projects run afoul of the "Iron Triangle" of project management: the interrelated constraints of Scope, Schedule, and Resources. This talk explores these constraints and how to realistically manage them.

1. Avoiding “The Iron Triangle” John A. Lewis Chief Software Architect Unicon, Inc. 29 July 2010 © Copyright Unicon, Inc., 2010. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/

2. The Iron Triangle

4. Change in one of these constraints has a necessary effect on one or both of the others.

5. If out of balance then one or more of them must change/break.

6. Or the resulting quality is destroyed by artificially meeting the constraints by cutting corners.

8. To make matters worse, they can get more out of balance as the project proceeds.

9. Many reasons for this problem that all stem for them fact that we have only limited ability to control, or even truly understand, all three constraints and the relationships between them.

12. Business has new ideas on project.

14. Successful projects must accept & embrace significant changes in scope as they proceed.

16. We never build the same thing twice! “Construction” analogies are false.

17. Still need to estimate, but use estimates properly. Useful for planning and baseline, but not as guarantee or promise.

18. Given that scope is likely to change, detailed estimates aren't valuable anyway.

20. Mostly people, some hardware/software.

21. Need motivated, qualified people with good chemistry.

25. Hard to accept, since it means uncertainty.

28. Questions & Answers John A. Lewis Chief Software Architect Unicon, Inc. [email_address] www.unicon.net