At this point in my career I have a pretty hefty project/program management toolkit. Even within that toolkit the Four Dials tool stands out. Agile, waterfall, spiral, portfolio management – almost any business endeavor (and a lot of personal ones) can benefit from regular use of this tool.

Traditional project management uses the ‘Three Dials’ tool to balance Resource, Scope, and Schedule. I add a fourth dial: Quality. I find that this additional dial makes the exercise much harder, but much more realistic and applicable.

On any project, you can absolutely fix (that is to say set the number on) two of the dials, say Resource and Scope. The other two (in this example, Quality and Schedule) would be the ones to give if issues arose. The ‘adjustable’ ones do have goals that the project tries to meet, but everyone on the project understands where the priorities lie. If you try to fix more than two, at least one of them will inevitably move – something just ends up falling apart and everyone has to scramble to recover. (Note that if only three dials are used, Quality is pretty much always ‘adjusted’.)

In the initial exercise, I put these four dials up on a whiteboard in early meetings with my product owners (and the entire team when possible). We discuss each one. Resource means money, people, equipment, bandwidth, anything needed to complete the project. We articulate the budget, determine whether adding more people is feasible if necessary ( often adding more people is not an option, especially late in the project when training time would cancel out any productivity, or on projects that have few concurrent activity threads). Scope is pretty straightforward – what needs to be done? How much room do we have to change the scope if necessary? If the project is an agile project, I try to dig out the ‘we can’t ship the product if we don’t have xxx’ factors so that everyone has the same understanding. Scope is one of those dials that typically gets moved when push comes to shove, and once past the absolutes is usually a reasonable candidate for the moveable dial. Schedule is pretty clear, no one usually has any questions about it. Quality, however, is something people don’t really consider as a ‘dial’, or moveable factor in a project; ironically, it’s the dial that’s most often moved without discussion or often even knowledge.

As noted earlier, in general you can put a hard specification on two of these dials for any project.Setting goals for the other two is important, but everyone on the team needs to know what will move if something needs to change.If more than two of the dials are fixed, one parameter will move – and the team will not get to choose which one.

If at any time it becomes obvious that the project is out of plan or off track (in other words, some of the dials are moving dramatically), the dial settings should be re-examined. Sync the entire team on the original dial discussion and settings and ask the project owner whether the business has changed in a way that the project’s parameters should be changed (conditions often change over the course of the project, regardless of the methodology used). This keeps everyone on the same page and highlights changes in the project drivers. (I try to make it painful enough to change the drivers that it is not done capriciously or often –once in the course of the project is disruptive enough.)

Finally, I revisit the four dials in the post-mortem or project wrap-up meeting to remind everyone of the goals and to assess how well the project did against those goals.