It’s been the project manager’s mantra for a generation… "Good, fast, cheap. Choose two." the concept of the Iron Triangle has been taught to IT project managers as unequivocal truth. However, in its simplicity, this statement leaves out the broader truth, which is that “Better, Faster, Cheaper. Choose ALL THREE” is achievable. The Iron Triangle may be applicable in some situations, but its constraints do not hold true when you look at the broader picture. NASA famously disproved the concept in the ‘90s, but IT Project Managers may find the results outlined in Howard McCurdy’s book “Faster, Better, Cheaper” hard to apply to their own projects. McCurdy’s book explains how NASA took a new approach to implement missions and applied this approach across multiple projects. The results were lower costs, faster delivery, and better outcomes overall.
Project and Program managers can follow the same path as NASA; find a better approach and apply it across projects. Within IT new technologies and management styles are constantly being introduced. If your organization has been using the same technologies and architectures for the past decade, then significant improvements are possible. Embracing these advances across projects allows for significant improvements in building systems Better, Faster, AND Cheaper. One area where General Systems Corporation has seen across-the-board improvement is through the adoption of Cloud-Native Serverless technologies.
Cloud Native Serverless Architectures are:
Better:
- Fault tolerance is built into the systems with no additional engineering required.
- Scale massively as these systems are built for massive internet scale
Faster:
- Developers don’t waste time on IT overhead (server installs, operating systems, networks)
- Organizational Agility is achieved by implementing small automatic services that can be maintained and improved independently
Cheaper:
- Utility pricing models mean that you pay only for what you use, and incur no fees for idle infrastructure
- IT Operations costs are also reduced, as these systems are managed by the cloud provider