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Ricardo: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Five Minutes Podcast. Today I like to talk about the misconceptions around A.S.A.P. or ASAP and A.L.A.P. or ALAP. First, let me explain these two concepts ASAP stand for as soon as possible, ALAP As Late as Possible. So when I tell you all, let's do this ASAP I'm telling you that let's just do it as fast as we can as soon as it's possible to make that job.
And as ALAP lets is a delay, lets's delay this until the very last minute to do it. And usually, the misconception is that many people think that ASAP is always good 'cause you are doing earlier, you are, you know, working before, so you are preparing better. And ALAP is bad, which means, procrastination, means you are delaying things up to the very last minute. And why is this is a mistake because it depends?
It depends on what type of project in general, of course, when you are talking about benefits and the results, what do you want? You want to collect the benefits as soon as possible because these increase the value of your project, and you want to avoid any delay that will hurt your benefit. However, this is not the case for all projects. So let’s give a small example, let's suppose tonight that you are inviting some friends for dinner at your place, but you are so paranoid about ASAP and you start cooking at 1:00 PM and the dinner was ready at 3:00 PM, but your guests would come at 7:00 PM.
What would happen? They will arrive and the food is cold. Why? Because you produce a too early that you will not able to collect the and maximize the benefit of your dinner. Of course, nobody wants you to start cooking at 10:00 PM and serve dinner at 1:00 AM, right? So there is a sweet spot. There is a perfect point. Where do you reach the best possible benefit? And there is the magic that we need to understand the concept of ASAP and the ALAP.
Let me give you a second example. When you are talking about payments or when you have an ABC list of materials for your construction, what did you want? You want to try to delay the items on the, A list As Late as you can, why? Because they are very expensive and if they are so relevant for your project, what you want, of course, you don't want them to arrive late, but you want them to arrive as late as possible because we know that you defer the payment and these will improve cash flow.
It's natural, for example, what is very common? Let’s suppose you are for constructing a new building. What is common too? Do you start selling the building before you start putting the first brick and why you do that? Is that because these improve your result, you are bringing the sales piece of your projects. Because if you think about a project that is constructing a building to sell it, the project has one B piece that is the construction, but there is a lot of pieces that are related to sales cash flow, finance, that you need to take care of as an in temporary, and why it's important to do that because what happens, you bring money and improve your cash flow and reduce your dependency on the external finance to build a building.
So you do this as soon as possible in what are you do? You try to delay the very expensive tasks to as late as you can, and this is the model that many manufacturers do and they call this just in time. And what is just-in-time? Just-in-time means you're doing and delivering things as late as possible because you don't want to, for example, that our car manufacture buy lots of tires, hundreds of tires, thousands of tires, or what do you want to do? You want the tire store right very close to the time they are connected to the car.
Because these will improve your results and reduce your risks. So there is exactly what I want you to think. Think that that concept of ASAP and the ALAP, they are not absolute many times being ASAP is bad because you're delivering too early and being ALAP is good. Okay? Because you are saving money by doing it, for example, a payment event, as late as you can. So think about that, then avoid this trap to think that there is only one side that is good, and the other side is always bad because projects are far more complex than that. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. It's, you know, next week for another five Minutes Podcast.
