"How can we make this go faster?"

We’ve all been there - you and your team have put in a ton of work discussing, refining, and estimating requirements, setting project milestones, and planning the work over a calendar. You start communicating your plan to your stakeholders and leaders and are met with a question many PMs dread:

“How can we make this go faster?”

This can be a frustrating question to receive. You’ve put a lot of work and thought into this already, only to feel like you’re being asked why you didn’t do it all better. You might be thinking, if I could make this go faster, I would have done that in the first place!

What you’re experiencing isn’t an indictment or question of your abilities - your leaders are simply asking how the timeline of the project might change if they are able to give you more resources or if you modified the scope.

Often referred to as the Project Management Triangle, there are three main constraints you have to navigate when planning: scope, timeline, and resources. I coach my teams to think about the tradeoffs that exist between these constraints - this helps them be prepared ahead of time for the inevitable discussion of timeline.

In order to pull in a timeline, you really only have two options: cut scope or add resources. Sometimes the reality will be that you can’t cut the scope, or that adding resources won’t actually increase your team’s speed and decrease your timeline. Other times the answer will be that yes, in fact you can do it faster by staffing more people to the work.

Try this exercise to understand how scope, timeline, and resources relate to each other while you’re planning so you can be prepared:

1. First, fix one of your constraints. As an example, consider a fixed timeline - you have to ship before the Q4 holiday season, because it is a peak time for your company.

2. Next, map out the possible changes you can make to your other constraints. There are only three possible options: increase, decrease, keep it the same. Not all of these options will make sense though, so ignore the ones that don’t!  As an example, if your timeline is fixed and you don’t think you can meet it, the only realistic options you have to hit that deadline are to do less work (decrease scope) or use more people to do it faster (increase resources).

Afterwards, you’ll have the possible paths forward ready to go next time you’re asked “how can we make this go faster?”!