I understand getting frustrated when one of your internal customers wants to control everything about the project. "They want to squeeze blood from a stone," you say. Indeed!
I mentioned in an earlier letter the board committee for choosing an architect [1]. Of course we cared about cost and quality, and we wanted the project done in less than a year. One of the candidates educated me on the "architect's triangle". The triangle was time cost and quality. He said that as a customer we could control two, but we had to give the third to the architect. In other words, if we wanted low cost and fast completion, we may need to compromise on quality. And if we wanted high quality and fast, then we better raise more money.
For IT projects, it's similar. Except usually everyone agrees that good quality systems are not an option. So the "iron triangle" for IT projects is usually time, cost and scope; good quality is a given,[2] Scope is the one that usually goes to the project development team.
Here's a tip: What many project managers have found is that breaking a project into phases that each deliver value to the customer is a good way to vary scope. That way you are not giving up on functionality, but may be deferring it to a later phase [3] |