Better, Faster, Cheaper—Pick Any Two

It used to happen at the kickoff meeting for every new program. The engineer managing the development team would come in with an armload of overhead-projector transparencies for the business-unit managers and marketing people, who were there to learn about features, design challenges, schedules, resources—the usual stuff. Inevitably, about the third foil down, would be one of those triangle graphics with a bubble at each vertex (Fig. 1). One bubble would say "faster," another would say "cheaper," and the third would say "better." Then, in boldfaced capital letters was the exclamation: "PICK ANY TWO!" From the scratches on the foil, you could tell that the project manager had used the same foil in every kickoff meeting since he had finished that night-school MBA.

The foil was a threat to those designers who couldn't—or wouldn't—look at a program-planning tool such as a PERT (Program Evaluation Review Technique) or even a Gantt (after Henry Gantt) chart. Its subliminal message was that if you come back to the team with "feature creep" (adding new bells and whistles) or a budget crunch, there will be an impact on the delivery schedule or performance numbers, or both.

That warning never stopped feature creep or budget cuts or delivery slips from happening, though. But the culture of "pick any two" placed some sort of restraint on those engineering annoyances.

When I was a young engineer, working with other designers who were dealing with Apollo program subsystems (I was involved with military transports), NASA and the U.S. Air Force were pretty comfortable with the concept.

If an astronaut complained that lithium hydroxide (LiOH) from the oxygen-recovery system was getting into his helmet and making him weep, a special task force would work on the problem day and night for six weeks, and NASA would fund the effort. (It wasn't the LiOH. It was Tang orange-drink powder, the task force concluded.)

In 1992, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin decided that it was possible to have all three. Under his "faster, better, cheaper" management philosophy, NASA launched 146 payloads valued at a total of $18 billion. All but 10 were successful.

Then came the debacle of the $125 million Mars Climate Orbiter (Fig. 2, left). This satellite was lost because Lockheed Martin failed to convert English units to metric units when coding critical software. It was followed by the loss of the $165 million Mars Polar Lander, which also was attributed to software errors.

An independent review said that there was a lack of guidelines and policies to implement the "faster, better, cheaper" concept. But more significantly, the Mars program had been underfunded by at least 30%. It seemed like "faster, better, cheaper" was a smokescreen for "cheaper."

Yet the pre-Goldin, $1.4 billion Galileo spacecraft kept going like the Energizer Bunny (Fig. 2, right). Designed for a two-year survey and launched in 1989, it deliberately plunged into Jupiter's atmosphere in 2003 after a journey of more than 2.5 billion miles. Along the way, it took detailed images of asteroid Gaspra as well as a tiny moon orbiting asteroid Ida. It then observed comet ShoemakerLevy as it crashed into Jupiter.

When Galileo reached Jupiter, it released a probe that parachuted into Jupiter's atmosphere and sent back nearly an hour's worth of Jovian weather data. Galileo then orbited the gas giant 11 times, observing its moons as they passed. During 14 more orbits, it concentrated on Europa. Next, it went deep into Jupiter's radiation environment to study Io. Galileo's suicide dive yielded data on the mass of Amalthea, one of Jupiter's inner satellites.

About the only thing Galileo couldn't do was bring back a monolith. And at $1.4 billion, or $100 million/year for its 14-year lifespan, each year of Galileo's life was on par with the lost Mars missions. But that was before "faster, cheaper, better."