The Project Manager, Systems Engineer and the Conflict over Project Resources

Project teams are expected to meet scope, time and budget goals simultaneously. It has been observed that many projects conducted nowadays are not able to successfully meet all three objectives at project's completion. Looking deep into project dynamics shows us that there is a built‐in conflict originating from the need to meet scope requirements with limited time and money resources. This conflict appears to weaken the ability of project teams to meet all objectives successfully because it impairs cooperation among team members. In the paper we share some observations and suggest some tools that might help the project team to enhance cooperation, overcome the conflict and improve overall project performance. First we note that many projects have reserves of scope, schedule and budget. In part of these projects the reserves span the whole project plans. This is typical to projects for which planning is done in a conservative manner prior to taking a commitment. In other instances the reserves are found only in part of project plans while the other parts are under‐estimated. This is a reflection of the uncertainty typical for most projects as of project kick‐off and on till uncertainty is mitigated. Second we suggest some techniques to use these reserves in a way that helps the team to meet its objectives. We propose to establish and use a requirements buffer, in an analogous manner to the already established time buffer suggested in the Theory of Constraints. Then we propose a methodology to manage resource buffers in a manner that overcomes the shortcomings of current buffer management methodology. In order to further improve collaboration between project team members we suggest abandoning some common practices in the interface between the project manager and the systems engineer, practices that do not contribute and sometimes even interfere with the ability of the team to meet project objectives.