OVERVIEW

Managing complex projects, such as websites, often entails many conflicting issues and concerns. You may think the time available to accomplish the task is insufficient, the job is too complex, or the budget is inadequate. Determining the proper course of action can be difficult. Understanding the three dimensions of project management time, task, and resources can help you get a grip on things.

Without an understanding of how these three factors interrelate, you can easily slip into a reactive mode, constantly responding to the crisis of the moment. Once these three factors are understood and appreciated, however, they become the reins of control by which you can effectively manage the development and maintenance of a complex website.

These three factors of time, task, and resources constantly interact in a Web project, changing priorities and fluctuating in importance as the project advances. Understanding how they interact gives you a valuable and objective perspective that helps demystify the development process. The project manager must juggle these factors and make decisions about tradeoffs and compromises along the way.

In Dynamics of Software Development, Microsoft s Jim McCarthy writes: As a development manager, you re working with only three things: resources (people and money), features (the product and its quality), and the schedule. This triangle of elements is all you work with. There s nothing else to be worked with.

These three factors can be represented as the three points of a triangle (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1: The project management triangle: time, task, and resources.

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