Opening up this week, I asked what are your knobs when look at the adage of Fast, Good, and Cheap. This touched on speed and cost. Yesterday, I touched on cost and quality. Today, lets hit the last line: speed and quality.

Our most precious resource is time regardless of whether it is spending it with your loved ones, or beating the rest of the competition. There is something to be said for the quality of the work too: when done right, you only need to do it once, otherwise you will have to redo it.

This is going to be a little techie side of the house, but bear with me.

Back in my engineering days, these were the customary trade-offs for what could be done to ship either a demo for an investor or make a release date before printing the master image (if you remember the days when software came on CDs).

The processes may have changed a bit over the years, but they have usually followed a similar cadence:

  • The problem is discovered
  • Research the problem
  • Come up with an approach (or three)
  • Implement the approach
  • Test/validate it
  • Ship it!

Yes this sounds a lot like waterfall, but the agile world follows something similar (whether it is explicitly called out in a sprint or a ceremony.

The list is the knobs

The time spent in each area increase quality and reduces time spent doing rework. If you only look at your time as from the problem discovery to shipping, then the phases in the middle are constrained. Additionally, each item on the list is dependent upon the the item above it from the time perspective, and can impact the choices made for the items below.

You can grow the amount of time available in one of two ways: look at what your problems could be prior to the close date (which is why the tech diligence is so important). Also, having a realistic expectation to get day 1 will give you the largest runway possible for having a successful close.

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If you’re interested in the master list of questions to help with your your initial investigation, check them out here!

PS: I will be in London for the Financial Times: Due Diligence summit on the week of Oct 8. If you happen to be in the area and would like to meet up, hit REPLY and let me know!