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Introduction
The concept of the Iron Triangle, also sometimes referred to as the Triple Constraint, or the Project Management Triangle, is a fundamental aspect of how we understand success in projects. The Iron Triangle is a representation of the most basic criteria by which project success is measured, namely, whether the project is delivered by the due date, within budget, and to some agreed level of quality, performance or scope. The Iron Triangle has become the standard for routinely assessing project performance (Pinto, 2010, p. 35).
The concept of the Iron Triangle is an effective way of communicating the interrelationships between these central success criteria. It is typically depicted as a triangle with the criteria on the vertices. Movement of one criterion, for example, in response to client demands or resource limitations, can put pressure on the other criteria. Failure in one constraint will likely lead to negative pressure on one or both of the other two (Mokoena et al., 2013, p. 814). This is sometimes expressed as “good, fast or cheap – pick two” (van Wyngaard et al., 2012, p. 1993). Misunderstanding or misinterpreting the Iron Triangle can lead to project failure despite effective management of all other aspects of a project (Mokoena et al., 2013, p. 813). Effectively managing the Iron Triangle has been found to be central to project success, however, it has also been found that research into the Iron Triangle is “[…] one of the most overlooked fundamentals of project management” (van Wyngaard et al., 2012, p. 1997).
Time, Cost, and Quality have been the most widely accepted project success criteria since the 1970s (Atkinson, 1999; Ika, 2009). However, research has shown that the field of project management has undergone considerable change from when it emerged as an independent field of research and professional practice (Kloppenborg and Opfer, 2002; Söderlund, 2004; Pollack and Adler, 2015). This research explores what the Iron Triangle is, whether the Iron Triangle has remained a stable concept, or if the meaning of this central aspect of how we understand project performance has fundamentally changed over time.
Literature review
Across industries, the Iron Triangle criteria are the most commonly cited measures of project success (Bryde, 2008). In a study of project manager’s...