I think the more money you have, the better the chances to succeed in the market with your product. However, we might not want to use all the money from investors in one product. Planning needs to budget the money so we can implement it into a different maybe smaller project so the company can still make a profit out of it as well. Also, new positions could be available because more projects could be ongoing. Therefore, more people are going to be hired and the company will keep growing. Hence, money is more important.
I think the more money you have, the better the chances to succeed in the market with your product. However, we might not want to use all the money from investors in one product. Planning needs to budget the money so we can implement it into a different maybe smaller project so the company can still make a profit out of it as well. Also, new positions could be available because more projects could be ongoing. Therefore, more people are going to be hired and the company will keep growing. Hence, money is more important.
I disagree. Although it appears like a "catch-22", the reality is that most projects hinge on finishing a product as fast as possible, because most costs come from paying labor. More money thrown at a project can also significantly affect upper management expectations of the project. Something like California's high speed railroad now has colossal expectations because of how overbudget it is. Yet no ever thinks that it is indeed going to meet expectations.
Also, one has to remember that most ideas are not novel. It's often how fast and how well one can execute the market delivery of a product. The product that gets through FDA approval and patents first well have significant advantages over its competitors, no matter how much money the competitors get. Furthermore, more money does not mean faster results. If a critical task of a project can only have up 5 effective members working on it and they are perfectly fine with the resources they have, more money won't make them any more effective. It just becomes a waste of resources.
Therefore my argument in general is that more money is generally worse than having more time, because working to have more time left saves more money and requires less returns to generate a profit.
I also agree that everything begins with money. If there is no money, nothing goes on. Placing profit before everything is how most companies work. Optimizing the process for the shortest time to gain profit is necessary at the planning stage. In this aspect, money is more important than time. However, the earlier marketing results in continuous maintenance and problems. There are too many examples that the company placing an unrealistic marketing time for the stock. Therefore, Balancing time and money is essential at the planning stage.
This was a great question as answers to this post seem to be fairly split between what is more important to a project, time or money. I would have to say that time is more important to a project than money. I say time is more important because delays can create a domino effect and lose money in the process. Delays can also ruin business's reputations and cause stakeholder's to be unhappy with the company and the project. Just from these two examples, it is evident that time is a variable in a project that controls money and is therefore more important. To manage time properly results in money being handled properly. The ability for a project to stay on time at the cost of not saving some money is more important to the project as the risk losing long-term costs and important intangibles due to valuing budget over time.
During the planning phase of the project, it is important to first assess the goals for the product/company. In regards to time vs money, these factors will depend on the project and its goals. If you were to shorten the development stage of the product then this will reduce overall costs, but if you were to invest more money into a project then this can also help speed up the development. When investing more money into the project, can help reduce mistakes and lead to a better project, which in the long term can help save you money. If the company’s goal is to produce a project quickly, then in this case, time is more important than money and during the planning stage, it is important to shorten the development stage. This will help make the project ready before the deadline. However, if the goal of the project is to produce a high-quality project with no mistakes, then the money is more important. This would take more money but may help reduce possible recall costs if there happens to be a mistake. Investing more money can also increase financial risk so it is crucial to understand the potential risks and benefits of each approach, whether time or money is more important.
Although both time and money are very important to consider during the planning phase,I also think that time should be given a greater emphasis. At the start of a project, the project team knows more or less what the overall budget of the project will be. Therefore, the team can more easily allocate that money to different resources. However, when it comes to time management, the team must focus on properly defining task start dates and end dates to ensure that there are no delays in the schedule. As the team suffers from more delays, more money needs to be spent on maintaining the project for a longer period of time. In addition, when deadlines are defined, stakeholders are notified and expect the project to be completed at the specified date. When deadlines aren’t met, these stakeholders won’t be pleased and puts even more pressure on completing the project, which may lead to other issues. Therefore, it is super important for the project team to conduct enough research to appropriately define task start and finish dates that give team members enough time to complete their tasks, taking into account all of the possible delays that may occur. If a delay were to occur, how do you think the project team should act?
In the planning phase of project management, it is important to consider both time and money since it is ideal to maximize the amount of time while considering the budget of the project. It is a catch-22 situation in that it is best to use as much time as possible to produce the best results, but the cost of the project increases as time increases. In considering which would be more important, it would have to be depending on the product being developed. If the product is simple to develop, and a shorter timeline does not affect the quality, then the money should be prioritized. In the case of medical devices, where these devices could be used as life-sustaining devices, it would be better to prioritize time. In order to produce the best device possible, it would cause the timeline to be extended, which in turn would cause an increase in the budget of the project. Although the cost would be high, the price of medical devices is already expensive, which would be a selling point for investors to be willing to invest in the development of the device. Therefore, the potential profit would be able to offset the development costs and would provide the best device possible, which would not be the case if the money was prioritized over the timeline.
This is a very interesting topic that could go in either direction. Although I believe time is definitely more important, without money there is simply no project. I think there needs to be a balance and this is where the project manager steps in and ensures the project is producing quality products while staying in the customers budget.
"During the planning phase of project management, both time and money are crucial. Timewise, the longer your product takes to develop, the more money you will have to seek from investors yet your product will have a higher potential to succeed. On the other hand, the less time you take to develop a product, you will not have to rely on stakeholders to invest but the likelihood of having a beneficial product may be extremely low. What do you think is more important to consider in the planning phase between time vs. money?"
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I Agree fully with this commenter. It is impossible to definitely say which is more important to the planning phase of a project. Time & money are the ultimate factors that determine the fate of a project. This is an awesome question. I do agree that it is most beneficial when planning is biased towards a longer timeline. I can give a bit of input based on my experience here. My current job involves scoping out projects almost daily. This necessitates a metric ton of communication between me, our president, and our foreman. We need to come to a solid conclusion about the timeline and scope of a project before we present a quote to our customers. As the economy is not very happy right now, we need to really get the ratio of time:money right. I always add a week to the lead time that the other two give me because I believe that more time just gives us more opportunities to make a better product.
I think time and money are both factors that are on either side of the spectrum. On one hand money can acquire the ample resources in order to execute a project timeline ahead of schedule. On the other hand an ample amount of time can allow a company to save money on resources due to an extended timeline. I think both scenarios have their pros and cons, however they both have to think about how to best utilize their resources at the end of the day. I think the project manager needs to understand the team that they are assembling to meet the goals on a given timeline/budget. Given a short timeline and large budget I would think a PM would consider mostly incorporating seasoned members into a team to execute quickly. However, given a large timeline and smaller budget I would think a PM would assemble a team which includes some junior engineers to learn and grow throughout the process since the timeline allows for mistakes/growing opportunities.
Time would be more important than money in the long run. As the original post stated, the potential to make more money from your product will not be achievable given the setbacks that will be made to ensure the product's safety. On the other hand, the lawsuits resulting from being inconsiderate of the harm to the consumer due to the product's usage will make the company lose even more. In the end, making more time to complete your project benefits everyone.
This is dependent on the company and the product they are producing. For a larger company, time is more important to them because they already have a large sum of money they can invest in the project. Larger companies tend to have more money, resources, and employees so they would focus more on time management. It might be better for them to create new products and put them in the market so their business can grow or they can get more investors or just meet public demand. Plus, larger companies also tend to have a lot more experience in creating a product and the project management that comes with it. So, it’s not necessarily true that the less time invested in the project means lower quality. However, for smaller companies, money is more important because they don’t have the funds that larger companies do. They have to work with strict budgets and produce a good quality product if they want to stay in business. Therefore, a lot of their project planning and decision making would be dependent on how much money they have for that project.
This is a question that comes up in a lot of decisions made in my workplace. I don't think that there should be a a polarized choice between time and money - it is always an profit optimization problem between time and money invested in the project. Money should be properly considered to properly supplement whatever activities that need to occur within a project. However, I think time is probably weighted a little bit more important. Some tasks can't be expedited no matter how much money is thrown at the problem - especially in R&D. These limiting factors in the timeline need to be strongly taken into account for the project viability since money won't be able to solve some of these time challenges.
I agree with a lot of the previous comments stating that the time is more important than money. With some projects, making sure to take the time to do the proper testing and that there is enough data for the FDA to support your project. If you try to cut the amount of time allotted for the testing process, it could still cost a lot of money in the long run for the company as well as increases the project risk. By creating a proper timeline that is able to create enough supporting data to prove that the product will work is extremely important and before creating a schedule for the project, there should be a meeting with each of the leads of the departments so that their input could be taken into account.
