You may have heard the consultant’s expression: “You can have it good, cheap, and fast—choose any two.”

If not, it is an instructive little saying to remember. For example:

Good and Cheap, but not fast—We can do good quality work and keep the price down, if in return you are flexible as to when we deliver the product. This flexibility allows the consultant to build in work on other more urgent projects as needed.

Good and Fast, but not cheap—We can do good quality work, and fast, but it is going to cost you a premium because meeting your urgency means we have to say “no,” or “not now” to someone else’s project.

Cheap and Fast, but not good—A consultant can do the work quickly, and not charge very much, and this may be quite attractive to a client with urgent needs and limited resources. But beware: The work you get may not be of very high quality, so that the time and money you do spend may be largely wasted.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 16th, 2006 at 7:47 am and is filed under Consulting for Nonprofits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.