What is the Iron Triangle?
The "Iron Triangle" is a concept in project management. It's called a triangle because it has three sides, right? In project management, these three sides represent three essential things: cost, time, and scope. Let's understand these.
- Cost: Just like when you want to buy a new toy, you need money, right? In a project, cost is the money required to complete the project. It can include things like how much we need to pay people helping us, or how much it costs to buy the materials we need.
- Time: This is how long it will take to finish the project. If we're back to our Lego castle example, time would be how many days or weeks you'll take to build it.
- Scope: This is a fancy word for everything we need to do for the project. If we're building a Lego castle, the scope would be all the parts of the castle we need to build: the walls, the towers, the gate, and so on.
The "Iron Triangle" means that these three things are connected. If you change one, it will affect the others. For example, if you want to build a bigger Lego castle (that's changing the scope), it might take more time and cost more money. Or if you want to build it faster (that's changing the time), it might cost more because you need to get more people to help you.