It’s a great brand:  The Iron Triangle.

Scope, Schedule, Budget.

We’re all steeped in this as project and program managers.  And we ignore it at our peril.  The zero-sum game trading off among the three critical parameters.

I prefer the Iron Quadrangle, even though it doesn’t sound quite as cool.

The Iron Quad adds Value as a fourth dimension.

Purists will argue that Scope already includes Value.  But in practice I’ve often found that charters are weak on value case definition.  And almost universally, value capture tracking and measurement are an afterthought.  There are multiple reasons for this.  The champions who originally sold a program move on and no-one’s minding the store.  Or at the end of a long project, the team is exhausted as much as exhilarated and loses focus.  Or the transfer from dedicated program teams to ‘run’ or ops team is weak.  Or there was never really alignment on the value case to begin with.  Or there are multiple hands in the cookie jar, chasing the same benefits, especially once a transformation is successful.  Or the baseline metrics were nebulous or never documented.  Ugh.

It’s a barrier rich environment, benefits realization.  Yet for all of that, it’s critical, because it’s intrinsic to the strategy—or if it wasn’t it should have been.  A few times, I helped set up a small Value Office or a ‘Benefits Tsar’ to drive this part of the work.  I found this to be a worthwhile investment of resources.  It helped ensure we got what we paid for and that we actually created the planned customer and financial benefits.

Value realization is a lot easier to do at an individual level than in a team or program.  For the most part, you know in your heart if you’ve succeeded or not.  If not, that’s perhaps a signal that your intentions were mixed at the outset or that you lost focus.

So it’s worth paying attention to Value in both these domains.

-Chris