On Time! On Track! On Target! Managing Your Projects Successfully with Microsoft® Project

Chapter Seventeen. Balancing the Budget and Other Project Variables

There is such a choice of difficulties that I am myself at a loss how to determine.

— James Wolfe

To be a project manager, you had better be able to juggle. Your aim is to balance the project’s objectives and scope with the constraints of time, money, scope, quality, and the realities of change requests, risks, and the ebb and flow of day-to-day progress. At the same time, you must temper the moods of your project team—from organizational inertia, when you need to plead for seemingly every bit of work, to a kind of euphoria in which team members become so absorbed in their work that time and money seem not to matter at all.

Regardless of the unfortunate circumstances that arise—a ...