The "Tripod"

You all must be wondering how a tripod is related to the Project Management. Let me tell you there is a deep connection between a tripod and the project management. Just like a tripod has three legs in the same way a project has three legs on which it stand, walk and finally sits. These three legs are: Scope, Time and Cost. 

Everyone who has any relation to the project management field is asking a question from a long time that "Which of the three constraints is more important?" and on which a project manager should spend most of his time in order to make sure the project completes successfully. The answer to these questions lies in a tripod; we can only understand the answer with the help of a tripod. 

Let’s assume that the project is kept inside a flask on the tripod and we have to perform a successful experiment. The three legs of the tripod represent time, cost and scope. Now if we increase the length of any of the leg then the balance of the tripod gets disturbed and eventually the flask which hold the project will fall down, which is something every project manager wants to avoid for sure. So we have to maintain a balance between these three legs of the tripod in order to carry out the experiment successfully.  

So the answer to the question is that none of the triple constraint is more important or least important. All of them are equally important and it’s the duty of the project manager to make sure there is a balance between all these to complete a project successfully.

There is one more discussion going on everywhere, that there are four constraints not three and the fourth constraint is Quality. So you all must be wondering that where this fourth constraint is represented in the tripod. This fourth constraint is nothing but the lines joining the three legs of the tripod and it solely depends upon the three legs, we can conclude that though we can consider quality as a constraint but it does not exist on its own in a project rather it depends upon the other three constraints for its existence.   

As a final conclusion, we can say that there are three core constraints (Scope, Time and Cost) like the three legs of a tripod and there is another dependent constraint called Quality which depends upon the three core constraints.