The Five Variables of Project Management

The Five Variables of Project Management
In "The Five Variables of Project Management," Sam Newman offers five things that affect the success of a project, including scope, time, people, process, and risk management. This is a slightly refined view of the traditional "cost, time, quality" triangle in common use.The triangle here is a common way of expressing a simple euphemism: You can have two of the three attributes, but not all three. In other words, you can have low development time and high quality, but the cost will be very high; you can have low cost and high quality, but the development time will be long; lastly, you can have low cost and low development time, accompanied by low quality (which, based on recent software development trends, isn't seen as being a bad choice, apparently.)Mr. Newman's five variables are also documented in slightly more formal language in the Wikipedia's entry on project management, along with more exhaustive explanations of the entire project management cycle.

Quality:

Quality is something that a project CAN conserve--although many do not.The quality of the outputs cannot exceed the quality of the inputs.The level of understanding of what the project is about, what it is for, what it is intended to accomplish, seldom comes anywhere close to what it should be. Whatever level it does reach sets a hard ceiling on what is attainable thereafter.Projects do not fail because they are poorly managed. They fail because they are doomed from the outset by inadequately understood requirements. The craft of project management is orthogonal to this.