Put some rubber in your iron triangle

Putting some rubber in your iron triangle will make your project better and more agile, even in a waterfall environment.

The Iron Triangle

Everyone in the project management community is?familiar with the concept of the iron triangle. You have to finish the project within scope time and budget.

Some are used to manage contingency but the real thing to do to achieve agility, regardless if?you are using waterfall or a different framework, is?buffer and buffer management.

Buffers and Buffer management

What is a buffer? Is an amount of time/budget/scope set aside to protect from unforeseen risks. What is agility, is the ability to quickly adapt to change, and learn from it.

Thus without buffer there is not even the room to adapt to change, let alone the ability to do it quickly. But having buffer is a necessary but not sufficient condition to achieve agility, also the quick part must be satisfied.

This is where the rubber analogy comes useful. You can think of buffers like rubber joints that help you making scope time and budget legs joint nicely even when all the 3 are moving. Now measuring the degrees of success of your projects equates to how much these rubber joints are stressed, the lower the stress the higher the success, while the agility is how quickly you can apply stress to each joint and the joint will nicely behave, without breaking. We can rrepresent the amount of strain applied to each joint as a color, green as low strain, yellow as moderate, red ad risky.

Most projects will be executed in a hierarchical organization of some kind, and this hierarchy or matrix/hierarchy network needs to decide when to use the available contingency or which one to use, time budget or scope. How quick these decisions can be made minimizing the total level of stress on all joints is a measure of agility, if you can adapt in 1 day or 1 week or 1 months the speed of decision alone will make a big difference.

Enabling fast and sound decisions

So here we go, how do we enable safe, or at least lower risk, decisions making at the lowest, thus quickest, level possible? The whole idea is that the closer to execution the faster, the less stress the better.

If anyone close to execution level has awareness of the stress status of the buffers and has decision making power within a reasonable degree they would be enabled to decide in the best interest of the project, with the lowest amount of total stress added and with the fastest reflex time possible. As mentioned to keep it simple we can achieve all these conditions by simply measuring the buffers and adding 3 levels, green yellow red.

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As long as we are in the green area the contingency can be used by whoever is in the ground without the need to add extra bureaucracy to the decision making process, we need to spend 1k out of a 100k contingency and we still have 97k in the buffer, whoever is managing the activity at the lowest possible level can do so. When the buffer is pushed in the yellow area other stakeholders are called into the decision making and also are prompted to replenish the buffer if possible. The same can be easily done for time using a contingency buffer at the end of the critical chain and measuring it. When an activity takes longer than the baseline consumes the buffer, an activity takes less than the baseline replenishes the buffer, assuming the following one can start immediately.

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Fever chart provides a convenient representation for both budget contingency and time buffer, and are extremely useful in keeping track of both. This is an example with critical chain time buffer but the very same can be done with budget.

Finally what about scope? How do we manage scope buffers. Requirements are normally marked with MoSCoW, Must, Should Could and Won't have. Initially we can strive for all but when time or budget buffer are pushed into yellow or worse red area, actions should be taken including sacrificing Could or Should task to put the other two buffers to safety, essentially we are trading some "could have" for the greater good of the project. Any task list or backlog with a burnup chart will provide a measurement of scope as a buffer.

So here we are, in a "close to perfect" situation the lowest, thus the quickest, management team will keep all the 3 buffers in green and the project will safely sail to execution within the original time scope and budget. What was required for that:

1.????Predefined and agreed upon buffers in time scope and budget.

2.????Clear information system that displays the buffers status, in real time.

3.????Clear decision-making rules when spend one buffer vs another.

The power of Buffers and buffers management does not end here. If you use fever charts to track the evolution of buffers you get an idea of the project trajectory and you can even simulate the impact of decisions, basically you are enabled with a "what if?" tool that has incredible information power when decisions need to be taken.

The effect on Management attention

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Finally, what you get back most than anything else is management attention. You can focus lower ranks on what is important for the project and free up higher ranks time for most important things.

Thus agility is not really empowered by a specific framework, here we assumed waterfall that is supposed to be the least agile of all. Agility is the natural consequence of the ability to protect the constraints of your system, adding the capability to monitor the protection amount and its evolution while enabling decision making at the lowest reasonable level.?To achieve this kind of agility buffer should exist and be sized properly. Information about buffer status should be continuously accessible and updated. People should be informed and trained about what this information means and how to use it properly.?

Bibliography

• Goldratt, E. M. (1997). Critical chain. North River Press.
• Goldratt, E. M., & Cox, J. (2004). The goal: A process of ongoing improvement. North River Press.
• Lepore, D., & Cohen, O. (2019). Deming and Goldratt: The Theory of Constraints and the System of Profound Knowledge. Routledge.
• Deming, W. E. (2000). Out of the crisis. MIT press.
• Tendon, S. (2022).The Book of TameFlow: Theory of Constraints Applied to Knowledge-Work Management.
• Goldratt, E. (2023). Rules of Flow. North River Press.