Sunday, June 20, 2010

Please stop moving deadlines

I've been struggling with deadlines for a long time, and I've finally discovered the pattern that makes my struggle most painful. They move all the time. A moving target is harder to hit than a stationary target, so my theory is that the more deadlines move the more futile planning becomes. The good thing about time is that it (usually) only moves in one direction, but man has invented budgets to compensate for this glaring lack of complexity.

So what can we do? Well just never, ever move a deadline. I will go into detail some later post on how to avoid deadlines altogether, but for now let's just consider what happens if you make the deadline stationary.

When you refuse to move the deadline the thing will not be DONE.
This is not a problem. Nothing is ever done. Done is an invention by people who like tickboxes. When the deadline comes you just do what you planned to do at that deadline, or you conclude that you have failed. Failure is good. Failure is the only true done. If you have failed you are free to go do something else, probably something that you have found the inspiration to do when you were dragging around Doomed To Fail project X. A deadline that can't be moved helps you to fail early and this will save time and money.

When you refuse to move the deadline the thing will not be as good as it can be.
This is a misleading statement. If you're building a cruise control driver, "as good as it can be" is a well defined concept, but most of us aren't building those kind of applications. What we're building is usually the implementation of some idea somebody dreamed up with very limited input. It might be a very good idea, but it's not well defined. In fact it's our job to define it based on small hints the product owner is giving us. This makes "as good as it can be" a moving target. The longer we wait to deliver, the further ahead the dream of the business will get ahead of our actual implementation. And the bigger the disappointment when we finally do deliver what we have.

But just look at what we have now! We can't deliver like this, right?
Maybe you're right - you're probably not though. Delivering is easy and delivering something that sorta works is much better than delivering nothing at all. You don't know if the business can break even with the thing you consider crap before someone tries. It is your obligation to try this as soon as possible. Cheating your customer into thinking he's going to get rich is not professional.

Much more important though: the longer you wait, the more you're going to think you're not ready. Dreams go faster than reality and by definition you will never catch up. By delivering whatever you have on the deadline and not moving it you're delivering reality to the dreamers. The earlier you do this the more they will keep liking you.

Ok, no more moving deadlines. But what happens after the deadline?
Well, its simple. After the deadline people will invariably think it can be done better. If you deliver your ideas of how to do things better with the unfinished product, you might get a chance to fix the things you wanted to fix before delivering. The good news is that you will get that chance based on realistic expectations. And if you don't get that chance you're free to do something else, which might not be a bad thing at all.

Posted via email from iweinfuld's posterous

No comments: