indeterminacy that is otherwise inherent in these trade-offs. Proceeding iteratively in
this way, the manager can explore the implications and trade-offs among schedule, cost,
and quality outcomes resulting from dozens or even hundreds of alternative cases of the
organization and work process in order to find one or more alternative cases that come closest
to meeting project goals. If the project goals cannot be achieved through changes in the work
process or organizational structure – which is often the case for projects with very aggressive
schedule goals – the manager can explore reducing the scope of the technical deliverables
for the project. In many cases, it may be more advantageous to the client to scale down the
project’s scope in ways that do not detract from its primary function in order to have at least a
scoped-down version of the product ready by a fixed date such as a tradeshow or a regulatory
deadline. This will shorten task durations and possibly eliminate some tasks, positions, and/
or staff members from the project team. In the biotech design case illustrated above, the client
ultimately found that the desired early December completion date could not be met with any
feasible configuration of the work process or organization, and therefore decided to use a
prefabricated metal building for the biotech facility instead of having the architect design
a custom building for the plant. This greatly reduced the scope of the architectural design
tasks and resulted in a predicted early December completion date, which the team was able
to meet.
The process of modeling, simulating, and evaluating predicted outcomes against project
goals, and iteratively refining and testing alternatives in an attempt to better meet project goals,
is summarized in Figure 5. By iteratively modeling, analyzing, and evaluating alternatives,
and exploring the impact of successive interventions, a manager can rapidly explore dozens
or hundreds of cases of the work process and organization, and home in on one or more cases
that provide the best trade-off among scope, schedule, cost, and quality project objectives.