How tight should your project be?

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satisfactionuk
Expert Member
Expert Member
Posts: 132
Joined: Wed 08 Sep 2010 1:38 pm
Location: Westminster - London

Consider this useful insight:

With today’s technology, an engineer can produce a hole and a spindle to go into it to within one-micron of tolerance. The only problem for the engineer is that it would be expensive to produce and to have produced it, it probably would not work as intended because the fit would be too tight for practical purposes. Therefore, engineers have learned to work within practical tolerances bearing in mind efficiency of purpose and cost or production.

This lesson of ‘efficiency of purpose and cost of production’ that engineers have learned is highly pertinent to project managers when considering how much slack to allow for a project when creating their plans.

Stephan Toth
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