Fast, Cheap or Good – Pick Two

 
The professional web services industry is plagued by an expectations issue. Every business owner wants a website or web project that is fast, cheap, and high quality. Then again, who wouldn’t? The problem is this is simply impossible. You can really only do two at best, and even that is not easy to achieve, requiring hard work and long hours.
If you expect, fast and high quality work, you need to pay a premium for it, otherwise you will be disappointed and frustrated. That is why you see most businesses fail to develop the website and online presence they would like to have, even larger companies that should have reasonable budgets struggle with this.
Ugurus is a successful company dedicated to helping web professionals learn the skills to get more realistic and appropriate budgets, a great example of how many web professionals struggle to achieve this.

Does Lean Methodology Make This False?

There are lean methodologies that on surface are proving it is possible to do all three, but this really only applies to something in which a basic MVP has value to the business. So in reality the lean and MVP concepts mean you are really falling short on quality because you are only building a small amount of the features now to prove the concept and not all the features you need for a high quality product many people will use and want.
A business that needs their entire site redone cannot really apply a MVP concept because they will need to take the big picture design into perspective. Building 3/4th of their site or just some of the features they need is not enough to get the job done. Although its possible to leave certain features for post launch work, the initial work to create a new successful website and scalable infrastructure will most likely be fairly heavy.

Which do you choose?

If you are a business and you have to choose between fast, quality, and cheap, what do you do? Well I think it really depends on the type of project, industry of the business, and size of business. A large business should focus on fast and quality because they can afford a larger project budget and going cheap just doesn’t make sense to stay competitive.
A smaller business may want to go with quality and cheap if they have the patience to wait for a good product and they can endure not having the value of a new web project for a long time. However if they need something up and quick to get value they may want to go with fast and cheap and skip out on the quality. Most likely cheap will have to be an option because they simply cannot afford quality and speed.

If you are looking for a realistic timeline, price, and level of quality to expect regarding a web project please reach out to me and I am happy to answer any questions I can.