Project Management Report

This report summarizes Roger Atkinson's research on project management, emphasizing the importance of cost, time, and quality. Atkinson highlights the limitations of the traditional 'Iron Triangle' and advocates for considering additional success criteria, particularly in post-delivery stages. The report discusses the need for new measurement methods and the evolution of project management practices, such as Rapid Application Development (RAD), to meet modern demands for faster project delivery. It also distinguishes between two types of errors in IT-IS projects: doing something wrong and forgetting something. The report concludes by reiterating the importance of evaluating project impact on customers, post-implementation measurement, and future preparation for successful project management.

Component 1
Project management: cost, time and quality is a report of research work conducted by the Roger
Atkinson in which he defined Project Management as the application of a collection of tools and
techniques by using diverse resources by accomplishing task within time, cost and quality
constraints. However, the author suggested that the project management is an evolving
phenomena and therefore needs to adopt some more factors so that the visions in the
organizations could be converted into reality. Which is why, Atkinson says, project management
continues to fail. The author feels the need to find the new criteria as to how to realize successful
projects. He said there are two types of errors that are needed to be defined when it comes to IT-
IS projects. Type 1 – when something is done wrong and type 2 – when something is forgotten.
In order to ensure the success criteria, it can be understood that some projects have time and
costs as the prime objectives, while for other projects such as life critical systems, quality would
be the overriding criteria. So, measurement of process criteria is what indicates the efficiency.
Author also suggested that project management and organizational success cannot be linked as
these two have different criteria. Therefore, it is important to evaluate the post deliver stage of
the project and the three criteria in the post-delivery stage are impact on customer, measurement
after implementation and preparation for the future. Project management today is needed to be
analyzed quickly because the modern day project managers are expected to deliver the results.
This pertinent need has developed a mechanism called Rapid Application Development (RAD).
Atkinson reconciles with and agrees with the findings of other researchers and reiterates the
workable criteria as Iron Triangle, cost, time and quality along with the new methods of
measuring success of project management implementation.

Reference
Atkinson, R. (1999). Project management: cost, time and quality, two best guesses and a
phenomenon, its time to accept other success criteria. International Journal Of Project
Management, 17(6), 337-342. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s0263-7863(98)00069-6