Project Constraints | Smartsheet

When you change one project constraint, it will often impact the others. For instance, if a budget decreases, project managers will need to adjust the resources and timeline. Consider all constraints to ensure that projects are successful. 

A good project manager knows how to stay within project constraints, but they also know when they can exceed them. The triple constraint triangle is one of the best examples. When scope increases, so must cost and time to balance it. In this scenario, if these constraints are not balanced, the project will cost more, take longer, and decrease in quality.

“On the market, there will always be some expectations. Managers should always be prepared to make accurate assessments at the start of a project. They should also be able to identify how and whether any adjustments made along the journey will affect the quality of the final product,” explains Max Hauer, Founder and CEO of Goflow.

When you exceed constraints, the project manager should determine the cause and decide whether or not the project should continue in its current form. Often, they will implement changes to avoid exceeding other constraints or exceeding any one constraint too much. This is why project managers should always build emergency funds into budgets and account for lead and lag time. By doing so, they can patch small holes before they become large ones.

“Balancing is admittedly tricky,” says Molly Beran, an experienced project manager and Founder of Projects By Molly, LLC. “In the past, I’ve done my due diligence to get as many constraints out in the open as possible and tried to figure out which ones work together and which ones compete. For example, you may have a budget constraint of not spending over a certain dollar amount, but you also have a time constraint of getting a project done in four weeks. If you have too much work and need more resources within those four weeks, it can be hard to meet both the budget and the time constraint.”