Soft deadlines are as problematic as fake news.
One of my favorite phrases is, “You get what you tolerate.” Setting deadlines is supposed to encourage the completion of something. It often involves a commitment from a person, a team, a company or an industry to, as Star Trek’s Captain Picard so eloquently says, “make it so.”
You gear up and commit to this deadline thinking it’s real, however, when the deadline comes, it turns out that it was more of a Jack Sparrow guideline. Nothing is more traumatizing to those who made the commitment and accomplished the goal on time. Knowing that others got to extend their schedules, delay costs, delay overtime and more, while your team made the good faith effort to meet the deadline, is very aggravating for those who put in the effort to hit the benchmark.
I have seen this repeatedly in corporations where multiple project teams were working in parallel toward their own team deadlines, only to find that another team had gotten to extend theirs, sometimes impacting all the parallel efforts.
And I get it; stuff happens. Certainly, the COVID-19 pandemic threw a truckload of wrenches into everyone’s schedules. But it’s not the unexpected that bothers me. You learn to expect the unexpected, plan for it, have contingency plans in place, and do your best to recover. What bothers me is the “artificial deadline,” where supposedly intelligent people challenge an effort by taking a realistic schedule and cutting off months or years to encourage progress.
This happens more frequently than management types will admit. A team leader does their due diligence with the experts and lays out what they feel is a realistic schedule. An experienced manager will dive into the details and challenge the planner, knowing some of the estimates have been padded due to unknowns or to reduce risk. An inexperienced manager (or autocrat) will just look at the proposed schedule and casually slice it by 10%, 20% or more to satisfy his manager. This can have a domino effect as managers higher up also can carve the schedule, hoping to impress the president, board of directors, stockholders or whoever.
You see this a lot in politics. Those in charge of a high visibility program needing funding will agree to unrealistic schedule compression under the hope that once the program gets funded, it will be possible to renegotiate the schedules downstream. Or they are hoping that at some point the project is more expensive to stop than it is to complete.
