This is perhaps one of the most talked about topics among professionals & you may have heard it before. If you haven’t come across it yet or if you are an individual with little to no background in the IT field, continue to read.
There is no denying that we all want our projects to finish as soon as possible & we negotiate our desired price with the aim of paying or spending the as low as humanly possible. Once it all has been finished & done, we expect a good (perhaps even “perfect”) result but it couldn’t be far from the reality.
In this triangle, you can always get one right if you aim for it. You might even get 2 with a combination of luck & extra effort but getting all 3 sounds as rare as winning a lottery. It’s possible, we have heard people winning it but you can’t rely on it.
I am going to attempt to describe every two possible combination of these factors & what you can expect in terms of an IT project & at the end I reveal a secret on how you might even be able to get all 3 but there will be a catch so let’s get going!
Cheap & Fast
You might be on a tight deadline & need a quick website built. There are many options & in fact you might not even need any developer or designer & instead want to try one of many services that offer drag-n-drop functionality to build your website. You write your text content, you drop your images & after a few clicks you have yourself a brand new website that looks fairly ok.
It might not be the cheapest but considering you don’t have to look for any designer or developer & spend a lot of time communicating & waiting for the result, it’s pretty cheap. What’s the problem? Well … It’s not really that good. Perhaps to majority of pair of eyes it will look fine but there’s no way it wouldn’t look like typical template made layout. Sometimes that is exactly what you are looking for but if you are aiming at something more & bigger, it’s better to look for other solutions.
There are also many websites & services where you can hire talents from countries with lower economical status therefore you pay less. You might get a little more individuality in the final product but still, you end up spending more or less the same amount of time on communicating compared to a experienced professional & the final results might not be remotely similar.
Fast & Good
p This is probably the contrast between the previous combination. Fast is the common factor here. You might be still on a tight deadline but perhaps there are more at steak. Imagine you have high quality audience or a premium or luxury product therefore, you can rely on something bland & mediocre.
You need the hands of some professionals who have done this sort of works many times before & when they make a promise on delivery, you can have a good night sleep however, it will not be cheap. It wouldn’t be really expensive if you have a lot at steak. Maybe we could just say : “the price will be right”.
Cheap & Good
After reading my last couple of paragraphs, you might have thought it wouldn’t be possible to get something both cheap & good, but it is in fact possible. There are many college students in the field of design or software development who are really talented & passionate about their subject. They are young & don’t have much experience so they are looking to do challenging projects & want to deliver good or even great results.
The same applies to junior developer & designers. They are not going to be fast because they haven’t done it enough times & don’t yet have a feel or intuition for it. So if time is not a factor for your project, you can definitely look into this area to find something good & cheap at the same time.
However, you still need to spend a lot of time going through a large number of candidates & portfolios but I think that would be okay because for this combination time or speed is not a factor. Word of mouth about a good a talented person can go a long way in this regard so perhaps you can ask around from friends, colleagues & relatives before dipping into the online oceans.
Cheap, Fast & Good
I started the article by saying that the combination of all of these factors is a rare event close to impossible so but there is actually one instance that I have experienced personally that proved to deliver on all these factors & that is in fact the model used in almost all successful startups.
Considering you have found the right individuals who are experienced & talented (Good) plus you are certain of their swift deliveries (Fast) you can offer them some shares or become partners with them in order to keep your short term losses at minimum (Cheap).
Of course there is a catch. You only lower your short term costs low & it is even possible that in the long term you end up spending the same price or even higher due to their shares but that would be worth it considering that you build a successful & profitable business. If you are building a digital product, you need the best of the bests to work on it & because of the competition you want to act quick & deliver fast so if this is your mindset, there is no catch.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed reading this article comparing different needs for a project & I hope it added something to your knowledge. You can check our other articles on similar topics.