Charlene Chatelier

Twenty-first-century literature on projects has stressed concern for understanding project management as the management of uncertainty. This perspective is informed by two fields within normative project management, those of risk management and the management of complexity. Such perspectives and these responses for practice conform to the ‘control paradigm’. Related to this control, and firmly established in normative project management, is the so-called iron triangle which links the project management challenge to first set and then stick to budgets of time, cost and ‘quality’. Problems with this interpretation of the iron triangle of constraints have seen adaptations being proposed, such as performance, client and stakeholder satisfaction, value, learning and more recently under the structuring of ‘programme management’, time, cost and benefits. This paper proposes to address the relevance of the current theory of project constraints specifically relating to the iron triangle through the lens of an inductive cross-case analysis of nine past megaprojects. These variables add a whole new dimension of uncertainty and accompanying complexity to the project challenge including the project success rates of projects. The underlying theory of the iron law for megaprojects would therefore appear to be obsolete. An introduction of a more ‘contemporary iron triangle’ as a performance measurement tool is made. With megaprojects continued to be regarded, a multi-trillion-dollar global delivery model, the magnitude of influence mega-projects exert on society necessitates the theory of project management to encompass changing perceptions of success over longer time frames. Whilst for more obvious mega-projects, this might be a more useful interpretation for all projects, arguably project management’s thornier test.