One of the primary functions of project management is to balance the attention paid to the three parameters shown in this triangle diagram.

This diagram is intended to indicate that the three main considerations of scope, schedule and cost trade-off against each other, and therefore require the team to find the appropriate balance between them.  For example, the longer a project takes, the higher its cost is likely to be, due to the resources that must be committed over a longer period.  If the scope, or extent, of the project, expands, it will have a direct effect on schedule and cost.  If cost must be constrained due to available resources, or schedule must be restricted due to delivery deadlines, then the scope that can be addressed is impacted.  It is good to remember, that a good design team can do anything……but they cannot do everything, at least not so long as either cost or schedule is limited.   Thus a balance appropriate to the project must be achieved between these parameters.  

Let us begin by examining what we mean by scope.

Scope is the extent of what the project will cover. The design team must determine the best design for the project.

Consider:

• What does “the best design” mean? 
• Does the scope for your project allow you the option of creating the very best possible product that can be designed to accomplish the desired objectives?
• Or is your scope constrained by tight deadlines and low budget that means you cannot make the most advanced design conceivable, but rather, must simply produce a product that accomplishes the desired objectives with minimal fuss?

Pixabay/ CC0

Pixabay/ CC0

Once the scope of the project has been established between the design team and the end-user (customer), it is best to keep to this agreed-to scope. It is dangerous to allow additional design activities to get added to the agreed-to tasks.  When this does occur, it is called scope creep. Managing scope creep properly can make you a hero, or turn your project into a disaster. 

Consider a design that is 2/3 finished, and well on its way to completion.  Suddenly one of your team’s engineers thinks of a new aspect which will improve the design.  Or perhaps your customer asks if it is possible to add a new feature to the final project. Perhaps the new aspect or feature sounds like a great idea and everyone agrees that it would really enhance the final product. Should you add it to the design? 

Before making a decision to add it, you should ask yourself these questions:

• Will it add cost?
• Will it delay the schedule?

If the answer to both of these questions is “no” then perhaps you should permit it to be added to the project,in which case you have just allowed the scope of the project to creep larger. 

But if there is no cost or schedule impact, you may make a happier customer, which is usually a good idea.  On the other hand, if the answer to those two questions is “yes,” that is, it will increase the cost or delay the outcome, then reconsider that the best design is usually the least expensive and simplest  design that meets all the agreed requirements. 

If the requirements were already met before this new addition was thought of, then rather than increase cost and delay schedule, your best course of action is quite probably to stop the scope creep, and stick to the original plan, without the new addition.  Scope creep can be very dangerous, because it always seems like a good idea, but may in fact have negative impacts on cost and schedule.  And once a project starts to let in scope creep, it becomes easier and easier to accept each new proposed change or addition, and soon the project can be hopelessly behind schedule and over budget.  Stopping scope creep early is the best plan.

What aspects of schedule should be considered when balancing all requirements?  Is there a firm deadline for delivering the finished product?  Is there a financial penalty if the project is late?  Is there a financial incentive if it is delivered early?  When is it needed to meet business needs? Is there an ideal time to release the new product to the market, and does your plan meet that schedule? 

A schedule can drive scope.  If you only have 12 months to complete a project, then you likely cannot incorporate new and advanced technologies which would require time to develop and proof test.  This means the end product may not be the fanciest and most impressive that it can be.  So there has to be an appropriate balance struck between the time allowed to complete the project, and the quality of the product.

Pixabay/ CC0

Pixabay/ CC0

What about the cost?  How much is available to spend? Do you have all the resources (manpower, production equipment, computing power, etc.) that you need to produce the product? What will be the return on money spent on this project? When is the funding available (now, at the end, or incrementally)? These are all considerations that must be weighed by the design team in the effort to balance the project requirements.

Cost can drive scope. If limited funds are available, then they will likely not support the inclusion of desirable options or new technologies. Thus the end product will not be as grand and glorious as it might be. This time a balance has to be struck between the available funding and the quality of the final product.  

Cost and schedule can result in a trade-off as well. Perhaps there is plenty of time to implement an extensive design and development project. But if the funding is not available to support the necessary resources, then cost will constrain schedule.

When developing the design space for a new project, the design team will derive a number of first and second level requirements and project constraints as described in the Materials and design 1 module, sections 1 and 2. These requirements and constraints may not all exist in harmony. Some perceived requirements may conflict with others. Since the design space in which the project will be developed is determined by these requirements, it is necessary to resolve these. So whenever requirements are seen to be in conflict, a compromise must be achieved in which a balance is struck between the needs that pointed to the various requirements.

This compromise needs to be reached, and this conflict resolved, before the conceptual design effort begins, otherwise the design team will have an indeterminate design space, which means that the solutions being developed may or may not fit within the appropriate design space. The requirements must be compared against each other very early in the project and any conflicts must be resolved by balancing the requirements against each other.

Pixabay/ CC0

The best outcome of a new design occurs when you deliver a product that delivers a value to the customer which is greater than the customer expected.  This is not something that occurs by accident.  It requires a thorough assessment of the situation in which the project is occurring, and an intentional effort to optimize the project so as to exceed expectations.  Often this requires the design team to incorporate a new and innovative concept.  But if multiple possibilities for such an advance exist, how can you determine which one is the one that will be optimal.

The acronym NABC (Need, Approach, Benefit, Competition) provides a framework which can aid the process for developing the optimal approach for your project.

Let us consider the resources that a new project will need across the time necessary to complete the project.  These resources may be individuals within the organization, such as the members of the design team which will develop the product.  Or they may be the workers in the machine shop or assembly area who make and assemble the individual bits that go into the finished product. These resources may also be equipment, such as computers necessary for the design and analysis aspects of the project or lathes and mills in the machine shop which will be used to manufacture the individual components. Regardless of what resources we are talking about, you should be able to use the Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and the Project Schedule, developed in the Materials and Design 1 module, to distribute the required resources across the duration of the project, such as is shown in the following figure.  This is referred to as Resource Loading.

Next, you need to look at what resources are available.  This is determined by other projects that are already scheduled or are in progress, using design engineers to perform the tasks of those projects.  It is impacted by the normal production schedule of your organization’s every-day product lines, which require equipment to be scheduled as well as manpower assigned to operate the equipment.  This resource availability can be plotted against the resources required to indicate when and where there are needs that cannot be met by the available resources.  You can use this tool to examine how your resources have to be shifted with time to try to follow the demands of the project.

With this comparison of information in hand, you may be able to make adjustments to your project schedule in a step known as Resource Levelling, which is intentionally planning your project so as to keep resource needs at a constant level.  Doing this requires a concerted effort on the part of the project team to distribute the work that must be done more evenly along the timeline of the project. If this can be accomplished, then it is possible to maintain a fairly constant level of resources, rather than continually shifting the resources around to meet a constantly changing resource requirement.  This is shown in the following figure:

An organization that is truly good at multi-project scheduling and resource allocation across all of its projects and product lines, will benefit greatly from being able to perform this resource leveling activity, because the organization will require a fixed size workforce and will not always be moving people and equipment from one project or task to another.

When resources cannot be balanced as described above, one alternative that organizations look at is outsourcing certain tasks, or buying components from a vendor rather than making them in-house.  If external engineering services are purchased, then these contracted services can fill the gaps when the resource requirements are greater than the available internal resources.  These contract employees can be hired only for the short periods of time when need is greater than available resource. Similarly, when manufacturing resources are inadequate to produce all the bits necessary for a product, it may be possible to reduce internal need by purchasing some of the bits from external vendors. 

It should be noted that resource balancing is not the only issue that may cause an organization to purchase bits or services from an external vendor. Components which are either very simple and common, like bolts and nuts, are almost always purchased cheaper outside rather than making them yourself. Also, extremely complex or specialized bits can usually be made less expensively by an external firm which specializes in those components. Thus it is often financially advantageous to purchase the simplest and the most complex bits from an external vendor whose expertise for those specific parts makes them a better choice.

Pixabay/ CC0

Supply Chain Management (SCM) involves the oversight of all material, information, and funding that is part of the process of transferring necessary bits from your vendors and suppliers to your organization and then on to the wholesaler or retailer who ultimately conveys the product to the consumer. SCM requires someone to coordinate the flow of material both within and between organizations.  The objective of a supply chain management system is to keep inventory at a minimum while simultaneously ensuring that there is product available whenever it is needed. Sophisticated software programs have been developed to aid organizations in performing this vital task.  Such programs involve algorithms which determine the best way to fill an order and ensure correct and timely delivery of the material to the next stage in the chain.  Organizations are also turning to web-based applications which can perform these same tasks

Pixabay/ CC0

The timeline for a project usually has a slow start or “ramp-up” in which less is accomplished than desired because the team members have to determine how they will work together effectively and as they come to grips with understanding all the requirements of the project.  There then follows a period when the team builds momentum and accomplishes most of the significant work, before the productivity trails-off in the closing period as the project nears completion and team members whose tasks are completed are transferred off to other projects.  This is represented in the following figure.

The level of effort being expended by the project team can be plotted against time as shown in the following figure, indicating that there is less effort expended by the total members of the team during the conceptualization phase up through the point where down select to a single design solution is made.  Many of the team members will not be brought fully on-board until this stage is reached.  Once that occurs, there is a rapid increase in the level of effort as all team members become engaged in developing the design.  Finally, as the design nears completion, the level of effort trails off and members of the team who are finished are moved on to other tasks on different projects.

As a project then progresses, a good project manager will track where the team is on cost and schedule so as to have a reasonable idea (within error bounds plus and minus) of where the project will be relative to projected budget and timeline at completion.  This can be represented in the following figure.

However, a truly good project manager will periodically step aside from the day-to-day operations of the project and will use the status up to that point as a prediction of what is to come, thus refining the prediction of timeline and budget for the next stage.  This can be done multiple times during the project to come up with a better prediction or extrapolation of the finishing condition, and this also narrows the error bounds plus or minus).  This is represented in the following figure

There are a number of possible problem scenarios that a project manager must watch out for. 

Some of these are:

• Thoughtless optimism – If the team views problems as exceptions and not something for which they are at fault, it sets itself up for major problems. Problems should be tackled head-on at the earliest opportunity, with an acceptance of responsibility.
• Assuming that Capacity = Demand – This problem scenario fails to recognize that a design project is not an assembly line process, which leads to incorrect resource allocation.

Pixabay/ CC0

Unfortunately, in the real world, the application of resources is not always as well managed as discussed in this section. Try NOT to let your organization react as shown in the following chart.

A poor program manager once said that there were Six Phases of a Project:

1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the Guilty
5. Punishment for the Innocent
6. Praise and Honor for the Non-participants

Try not to let this happen in your program.  A good program manager creates positive expectations for the team and manages the team to those expectations.