FIRE is a book for project managers
and people in leadership positions that outlines four core principles for a
successful project – fast, inexpensive, restrained and elegant. ‘Fast’ is doing
quality work on short timeline, no cutting corners, no haste, going in right
direction, ‘Inexpensive’ is about setting cost ceiling, not about making a
cheap solution, ‘Restrained’ means self-control in all other principles and ‘Elegant’
is making things simple.
The book has been authored by Dan Ward
who is a Lieutenant Colonel in military engineering in US and he shares his
insights based on analysis of several defence projects, the likes of spacecrafts,
propellers, rockets etc, a lot of which have been highlighted in his book.
Dan advocates reliance on smaller
teams, tighter budgets, shorter schedules and simpler goals. Smaller teams gel
well and have fewer communication issues. Tighter budgets foster creativity to complete
within constraints including dropping of unnecessary feature. Shorter schedules
help us to see things better in short term (at the same time not losing control
of larger vision). Simplicity is moving away from creating a complicated
solution, one which is easier for users to train on.
Dan also highlights why we keep following
the opposite of FIRE. The reasons for the same includes notion of associating
bigger project with costly and bigger team, notion of a better product only if
it has more features and belief that complexity is same as sophisticated.
Personally, I found these principles
as a good refresher. I had heard or read about these on a piecemeal basis and
it was good to discover these principles also working for most complicated
projects as in defence. I also found FIRE principles to be close to Agile manifesto,
especially around smaller teams and short-term planning.
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