Deadlines don't exist

[EternalOptimist]

I believe we are on the same page on this theme! I'm now one of the villagers pissed off with the boy crying wolf.
I

to be fair, the wolf did get them in the end

[Contractoid]

Maturity needed on aisle 4

Mmmm. I liked your earlier post and it had some very good points to it. Sorry though, i'm sticking to my guns on this. I have seen too many disputes, arguments and even broken careers caused by deadlines conjured ¬up out of thin air by vastly overpaid and overrated individuals with personal agendas completely out of alignment with the needs of the business or within the bounds of reality. Ner! (That’s me being mature)

[MPwannadecentincome]

In my experience deadlines exist for the return on investment to be realised.

In small companies this is often a back of the fag packet calculation with senior directors/owners/managers/whoever being optimistic for the day their profits go up hence a bigger dividend or bonus.

In big corporates all projects need a business case for approval for funds unless a senior manager/director has some "spare" funding for something "on the side". For the former, a funding board will look at when the return on investment predicted to kick in before agreeing to allow a project to start, so there is competition for limited funds overall and only those projects that promise to deliver increased profit quicker will be funded, this then drives targets for the business benefits to be realised as quickly as possible, bonuses and deadlines then follow. For the latter, "on the side" projects are often kept below the radar from corporate headquarters hence need to finish quickly, sometime the deadline is simply to spend the money before the end of the financial quarter, half year or year, particularly if the funding would be lost if "not" spent.

Off topic: Very few projects achieve their predicted return on investment, often not within a few months of their original targets sometimes never, hence the deadlines are basically crap. If they all did hit those targets then profits at these companies would be shooting up rapidly!

[cojak]

Deadlines don't exist

While I've seen lots of business cases 99% of them have been crap and there has been nothing else to follow.

In my experience management wouldn't recognise ROI if it walked in an hit them on the head.

If they did they would understand what business drivers they are trying to meet, understand what benefits management is and at least attempt to pull out the most obvious benefits and put a proper plan in place to realise those benefits.

Instead of running around like headless chickens attempting to meet a deadline that some senior arsehole stated simply because it is before the next shareholder's meeting.

I despair sometimes...

[MarillionFan]

Fair enough. I'm talking about the sort of deadlines that are made up by guesswork (often completely unrealistic) and when not hit there is a completely over the top reaction and ridiculous blame game politics that destroys relationships.

You have to set deadlines, boundaries and limits for people to work to. I recently had a guy (coder) who kept missing every deadline given. 'The way I see it MF is, that the work is still going to be there the next day anyway so I don't need to stress if I get finished on time or not'.

Whereas I understand his point that in our company were so busy there is work to do everyday I don't think he understood my point. Unfortunately for him his argument was only true as long as he had the job. Which he now doesn't. :-)

[Sysman]

originally from

I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.

Douglas Adams
English humorist & science fiction novelist (1952 - 2001)

</pedant>

Aye, but the deadline that Ford and Arthur encountered at the beginning of the story was somewhat pressing.

[Sysman]

Instead of running around like headless chickens attempting to meet a deadline that some senior arsehole stated simply because it is before the next shareholder's meeting.

I despair sometimes...

In the late 90s the job of fulfilling a requirement that had floated to the top of a To Do list landed on me.

It was more to do with a power struggle between a young manager and our director than actually needing the program in question. The first I knew of it was "Why is this 3 weeks late?". It simply hadn't been on the radar in any of our department's weekly meetings during the 6 months since I had arrived.

To put it into a nutshell someone had been trying to edit a config file using the equivalent of Notepad and finding that difficult wanted a full blown GUI program to do the job. Furthermore the department who had instigated that request no longer had responsibility for maintaining said config file, it was down to our department.

After a couple of days of getting "Is is ready yet?" every quarter of an hour I put my foot down. I amended the existing documentation to specify the use of an editor more suited to the task and added examples and that was it.

[original PM]

You have to set deadlines, boundaries and limits for people to work to. I recently had a guy (coder) who kept missing every deadline given. 'The way I see it MF is, that the work is still going to be there the next day anyway so I don't need to stress if I get finished on time or not'.

Whereas I understand his point that in our company were so busy there is work to do everyday I don't think he understood my point. Unfortunately for him his argument was only true as long as he had the job. Which he now doesn't. :-)

Could not agree more people need to understand they are part of a process in this example he was delaying downstream activities such as testing and testing resources need to be organised etc

For me the team needs to agree realistic deadlines and stick to them. If the task suddenly becomes more difficult than first estimated flag it early and rebaseline.

It's not difficult if we remove the aggressive blame culture often found where kissing ass and stabbing backs is more important than getting the Damn job done