This article will provide an overview of a “quality triangle” of any project, which is also known as a project management triangle. 

Definitions

Let’s define each element of the triangle first.

Scope

This element includes absolutely all tasks that need to be fulfilled for the project. Cost and time directly depend on scope of work and that’s exactly why we need to consider the number of human resources required for every task in relation to all website areas. 

Cost

Similarly to “time”, the project’s cost is a reversible element. 

From one side it includes the cost of all tasks for the entire website development, including some commonly non-obvious ones, such as setting up a ready-to-use Drupal platform consisted of specific assembly.

From the other side, the cost element should resemble the maximum amount of budget that could be possibly provided by the customer. 

Time

Usually time element states for time period required for completion of the entire scope of work for website development along with all functions.

However, it’s a common case when time states for deadline which was set by the customer for development and launching a new website.

Quality 

Quality is the fourth peak of the "management triangle" which makes it a three-dimensional pyramid. This aspect refers to a perfection degree according to which the website addresses the explicit and implicit customers’ expectations.

Possible alternatives

It’s quite easy to notice that amongst all elements of the triangle, the scope is the most solid and difficult one to change. It directly impacts on the cost and time of development process and it’s almost impossible to be reduced without serious quality damage of the final result. 

For instance, while developing an online-store you can considerably simplify the product catalog, website navigation and so on, but by the end of the day, this store may very likely become inconvenient for the customers in terms of usability. As a result, the business may lose from many perspectives. The same logic of “simplification” and risks related to it can be applied to any other type of website. 

It’s highly important to define the scope as precise as possible from the right beginning, even though you may allocate the tasks by different stages in the future. 

Fast, cheap and quality

Surprisingly, this possibility is real, given that you have a small scope of tasks. For example, development of landing page websites with a limited functionality falls into such a case.

It’s also fair to say that a small scope of tasks is possible when the entire functionality of a new website exactly replicates the previous projects of the development team. But you understand that this could be such a rare coincidence that it can only be referred to a theoretical example.

Furthermore, we can divide the possibilities with a small list of tasks like the following:

• Fast and cheap;
• Fast and quality;
• Cheap and quality.

Fast

Strict deadlines are often the case when speed of development becomes your priority, considering that there is no way of failing them. Many people think that a bigger number of developers involved will solve the problem of urgency since they will distribute the tasks among themselves and work together peacefully and productively. Even though the chances that the speed of progress will be improved are high, an overall effectiveness of their work may suffer a lot. For instance, involving more than three specialists is practically meaningless, because you risk spending more time to discuss the project rather than actually working on it. 

One of the real practical solutions when dealing with strict deadlines is decreasing the scope of project required at every particular stage. For example, if you have an objective to launch an online-store with a full product range, engaging contests and loyalty program within a month, it’s worth prioritizing the tasks by choosing the most important ones for launching within this time period. This way, you can provide a ready-to-rock website with the basic functionality to your customers, keep the deadline and develop other features and functionality later. 

Unfortunately, you won’t be able to reduce time by reducing the scope of work and keep all desired functions. Big scope of tasks requires time for its quality implementation, but you can still win time and launch an online-store with the most important functionality on the first stage. 

Sometimes you can exhilarate the development process by reducing quality criteria. In other words, this tactic is a method of reducing the scope of work by removing a stage for testing and fine-tuning. Yet, you must understand that there are certain limits beyond which you cannot reduce the quality any further. You don’t want your website performance look like a joke, don’t you? Otherwise, you may end up into a tragic situation like “I type with a speed of 6== symbols per minute, but it looks like crap..”.

Cheap

What can you do with a limited budget without possibility of increasing it?

You can reduce the scope of work like in the example with a limited time. However, it’s not always possible to split the project into the stages and make them affordable enough. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s better to give up on the entire project than spend the resources you have and get something useless or incomplete by the end of the day.

Quality

If quality is your absolute priority for a large project, then cost and time directly depend on the scope.