Fast, Cheap, or Good

Sleep, study, and a social life: choose two, because you can’t have all three. At least, that’s what an old student proverb would have us believe. There is a similar “Iron Triangle” in project management: scope, time, and cost. You can do something faster, but it’ll cost more or be smaller in scale. You can do something bigger, but it’ll take more time or cost more. You can do something more cheaply, but it’ll end up slower or smaller. Explore the tools below for navigating these pressures, then discuss with your team: are there times when we might want something to be smaller, slower, or more expensive?

Kanban | Gantt Charts | Harmonogram | Dependencies | Risk Register
Stakhanovite Movement | Critical Path Method | Program Evaluation and Review Technique

The Sydney Opera House was promised in 1957 for $7 million and four years. It opened in 1973 — $102 million and a decade late. Something had to give.

Key concepts

The Iron Triangle: A project balances scope (how big), time (how fast), and cost (how cheap) — improve one corner and you force a trade-off on another; you pick priorities, but you can't escape the triangle.

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Every work — at a glance

Kanban

A visual board of task cards that move through columns (to-do, doing, done), with strict limits on how much can be 'in progress' at once.

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What to know

01
Every tool here manages the trade-off rather than escaping it — Kanban limits work in progress, the Critical Path Method protects time, a Risk Register hedges uncertainty — but none lets you have scope, speed, and cheapness at once, which is the whole point.

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Across subjects

Literature has told this for centuries as the cursed wish. In 'The Monkey's Paw', a family wishes for money and gets it — as the payout for their son's death.

Theme connection

"Are We There Yet?"

You can get there faster, bigger, or cheaper — never all three. When might we want the 'worse' corner? One side says efficiency is king: faster, bigger, cheaper adds value. The other points to a cathedral built over centuries, a chair made by hand, a drug tested slowly — sometimes the worse corner is where the value lives.

Practice — a sample

SOCIn the Iron Triangle, gaining speed usually comes at the cost of —

A Worker safety
B Scope or budget
C Team morale
D The deadline
E The extra paperwork

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