In everything you do, these are your limited resources (in order of importance):
- Time
- Energy
- Money
If you have no time to get something done, it makes no difference how much money you have – you will not get it done. If you have no desire or energy to do it – it will not get done. And if you have time and energy, you can always overcome a lack of money.
If you setup processes and procedures that waste Time, you are doing something worse than wasting money. Wasting Time is the waste of the most precious of all resources. Yesterday is now gone and will not return. If you did not release your product last month, you can never go back and try again. If you let Time go by you lose opportunities that you could have taken advantage of if you had just simply put your ideas out there.
Sapping your team’s or customer’s Energy is almost as bad. If you wear people down to the point that they no longer care, you will always struggle to get them back on board with your ideas and goals. The easiest way to sabotage a project is to staff it with people who don’t care. Energy and desire are the motivation to get things done. Wasting it also wastes time.
Money is a limited resource but does not get anything done on its own. If that was the case you could just throw money at problems and have them go away (news flash, this rarely works). Yes, this is the resource that management looks at and therefore receives an inordinate amount of attention, but without the resources of Time and Energy, the investment of Money will never have a return on investment.
Hey, isn’t this just Lean said another way?