An Alternate Means of Propultion
Bruce Tate has written an excellent article called An Alternate Means of Propultion. The article lists three ideas for saving time and money on development projects. From a management stand point though, all three ideas are counter-intuitive. The ideas in a nutshell are: reduce the size of the team and ensure it only contains top level developers (high performers); look for frameworks that save time in the development process; and make developing fun.
I cannot agree more with his recommendations. Especially the last one. I have seen what happends to developers when they are asked to sit around for months with nothing to do. I have also seen what happens when you introduce the right framework into the development process. At work, I got them to use Hibernate and it made a big difference. Unfortunetaly I cannot quantify that since I left before it was really used. However, they are still using it, so that is a positive sign. The next addition is Spring.