Good, Fast & Cheap: Pick Any Two
In this brief entry, I’m going to share with you something I’ve learned through hard lessons in the IT industry. There are certain rules to live by in life, like the Golden Rule, the 80/20 Rule, and, of course, Wexelblat’s Scheduling Algorithm (it’s a rule, but programmers love algorithms). It goes something like this:
Pick any two: Good, Fast, Cheap.
It turns out that you can’t eat your cake and have it too (actually, this expression is truly supposed to be written that way around). Let me put it in starker terms:
Pick your favorite: Lousy, Slow, Expensive.
Judging by my own finances, I apparently like Expensive, which buys me a good and fast result. Maybe patience is your thing, so you will achieve a good and cheap result—not too shabby. Lastly, if you’re willing to accept schlock, you can get it both fast and cheap. If you refuse to accept this proverb altogether and try to achieve all three points, you’re likely to end up with none (we’ve all seen projects like that, yes?).
The key to success, I think, is to choose the sacrificial quality uniquely for each project and to work to mitigate that affect throughout the project’s lifecycle. Here at Fandotech, we rarely sacrifice the Good, considering the quality of our work to be paramount. As a result, we’re not always the fastest or cheapest solution, but we’re always the best solution.
I’ve been called a cynic. Indeed, if a cynic is a realist with experience.