Key Concepts We Learned From Chapter 9

Chapter 9   Balancing the Trade-off among Cost, Schedule, and Quality

1. Any project with given time, money, and resources will always have its limitation on the cost, schedule, and product quality, properly manage the balance and trade-offs are a critical challenge for the project management. The balance on the cost, schedule, and quality can be taken on project level, business case level, and enterprise level.  
2. Balance on the project level includes re-estimate the project for its definition and work packages, adjust the task assignment so as to effectively use the schedule float, adding manpower for shorten the schedule, using expert to increase productivity, seeking expert resources from outside, partially or completely outsource the project, compress the tasks on the critical path, push people to work over time.  However, all of these attempts will have trade-offs, attention should be paid to analyze best way to apply each effort in a balanced approach.
3. Business case level of balance can be implemented through reducing the product scope, giving fixed phase schedule to make top down scheduled apportion, overlapping tasks with fast tracking, dividing the full product deliver into phased product delivery, using Crosby’s double effort method, and modifying the profit requirement. Again each approach has its limit and trade-offs, one needs to carefully balance them and pick the most efficient way in each case.
4. Enterprise level of balancing should be conducted when we face a challenge from insufficient equipment, personal, and budget. The company has to decide which project to pursue with finite budget and resources. Making these judgment and decisions requires accurate estimation on each individual project against resource, cost, and schedules.