Question

What is meant by a trade-off and who is ultimately responsible for approving tradeoffs? Who are the major players in performing trade-offs? The most common tradeoffs occur on TIME-COST-QUALITY. Which of the three do you think is most important to consider? Explain you answer and give examples.

Answer 1

Trade-off in simple words mean trading for. In a situation if there are multiple alternatives, you weight the pros and cons of each, to thereby decide which option to take. The option you choose will be hard, as it will not be fully satisfying what you want to achieve. For ex: for a basketball match, you have two players. One is fat but has very high accuracy to shoot ball into net. Whereas, other is fit but has very low accuracy to shoot ball. You only have to choose one of them. Its a tough call as you have to win the game but a fat guy can be a blocker in the game as well. Ultimately, it is the coach's call whom to pick (hence decides on the trade-off).

Similarly in real life, there are many stakeholders in a trade-off. But, ultimately the owner of the situation takes the final call on the trade off like mentioned above.Major players in performing trade-off are subjects(goods), stakeholders and owner/person responsible. For ex. for the above basketball game, two players are subjects, team/management/people watching are stakeholders and coach is person responsible.

Similarly, time-cost-quality is also a trade-off situation. But I believe, quality is the most important as if you don't keep a tab on it, it leads to increase in the amount of time taken and cost of effort as well in future. Quality is ignored most of the time but is hard to ignore in the long run.