If you haven’t heard of the project triangle before, it’s just a way of thinking about common challenges in any project. You can only pick two from a list of three project goals — good, fast, and cheap. You can’t have all of them at the same time.

The project triangle.

Wikipedia lists these three statements as options derived from the triangle:

1. Design something quickly and to a high standard, but then it will not be cheap.
2. Design something quickly and cheaply, but it will not be of high quality.
3. Design something with high quality and cheaply, but it will take a long time.

Although not necessarily ultimate truths, I agree with statements 1 & 2. But what is up with number 3? That doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Statement 3 suggests that you can in fact get a high quality design cheaply. What I can’t understand is how the time spent on the design process lowers the price. The process for high quality design takes a certain amount of time no matter what the budget size is. Sure, you can take a few shortcuts here and there. If you’re lucky, maybe you will even stumble on a great design at the end. Kind of like how you can become rich by winning the lottery.

Let’s look at the statements in action.

Think about an imaginary website project that a three-person team is working on for a client expecting high quality. If it needs to be done quickly, the whole team should probably work on it simultaneously. Everyone does a third of the work and the project gets done in a week, 120 billable hours in total. The design is high quality and everyone’s happy.

Splendid.

Now, let’s say the client wants the project to be cheap in addition to it being high quality. According to the project triangle it’s not a problem, the project will just take longer to finish. Longer means that you can spend more time working on it, but based on the previous paragraphs a high quality design for this project can be accomplished in 120 hours. If you now put yourself in the shoes of the team about to create the website, how do you make a 120 hour project be cheaper than a 120 hour project?

Impossible, right?