If you ever needed to visualise the 3 things that you can’t have all at once, like GOOD, FAST, CHEAP, I made a little tool for you! You can use it whenever you are having a project deadline discussion at work or just for fun. Enjoy.
In my experience good is never cheap, regardless of how long it takes. In fact most of the time the longer it takes the more expensive it is. This triangle thing is a meme at this point.
I don't know if you'd consider this to be part of the same triangle, but one exception I've found is when _waiting to start_ makes something cheaper.
E.g. waiting until someone else makes something so you don't need to make it yourself, waiting for some new technology to become cheaper before jumping on it, waiting until an opportunity cost isn't as high, etc.
… waiting for a team to be free and no new project in the pipeline. It’s how we often got teams full over the summer: offer clients a discount for waiting.
The actual triangle is much better when you don’t add in the common admonishment/instruction “pick two”. I have no idea why that’s added in.
The much better instruction is “pick a point on the triangle”. If you want it as good as possible, it’s neither cheap nor fast. You can have kinda good and kinda cheap, but it won’t be fast at all. And so on.
When you're a plumber talking to a homeowner, or any human talking to any other human... seriously triangle diagrams and pick a point in 2d space along 3 axis...? It's a valid graph but it does not roll off the tongue and does not convey the point as simply and quickly. It just adds granularity and complication to the same essential concept.
That next level of refinement maybe comes later in the same conversation, but the shorter sound byte still comes first and is not wrong just because it's the outline rather than the full dissertation.
You have to take the context in to account and then it makes more sense.
For example: unskilled labour used to be essentially free. In that case good and cheap meant either training someone (slow) or finding someone who already did it as a hobby (slow because they are hard to find then don’t prioritize your project).
Similarly: the culture it was created in didn’t value “personal time” so doing it yourself over time with a minimal cash budget was considered cheap. Now we’re all pretty familiar with opportunity costs and paying ourselves for sustainability.
Personally, while I feel like this triangle does show it’s age a bit it still serves as an excellent reminder when Those In Charge are trying to justify convincing themselves that they can have all three. Thankfully just that checkin has multiplied more than a few invoices so that there’s enough budget for quality.
I think the point is that to go faster, you have to throw disproportionately more people at something, and probably build it in a different way to accommodate that, and test the integration of their work more. Cost is people x time, not just time. Three people working steadily for a year will be far more efficient than 20 people working for 6 months.
https://trizuliak.com/experiments/good-fast-cheap?good=Easy%...
It'd be nice if there was a way to pre-set selections, too!