Triple…Multiple constraints

The triple constraints of Scope, Budget and Time is widely used in project management practices, trainings and publications. The “iron triangle” showing the 3 constraints together (with sometimes Quality or Customer satisfaction in the middle) – with the explanation that if one of the constraint is moving then the other are very likely to be impacted – became a reference in the profession.

Project manager job advertised will ask for PMs able to manage those constraints. Candidate are usually used to this as well.

But things are changing.

I had a couple of “Twitter” discussions recently about agile vs. ‘traditional’ approach to project management. Traditional means Waterfall for most people (including me), at least in IT.

I am a PMP and I live the UK the birthplace of Prince2, I therefore feel the need to understand Prince2 although I don’t really want to pursue Prince2 accreditation, so I set out to read the Prince2 ‘book’ (Managing Succesful Projects with Prince2) and check how it compares to PMBOK.

In this first article I introduce PMBOK v4 and Prince2 to give a general overview, then I will then attempt to make a link between both standards organisation.

In the subsequent articles I will go into more details about comparing the two standards.

h2.

I passed my PMP certification with PMBOK® Version 3. One of the frustrations I had with it was Project Scope management knowledge area that was essentially focusing on the Project Scope and not the Product scope. The product scope was acknoledged but still not the purpose of the knowledge area, "This chapter focuses on the processes used to manage the project scope." (page 104).