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.
There have been quite a few examples coming out of aerospace and defense over the last 60 years. It’s almost an art form. Especially where interrelated projects are involved, then it’s critical that one not be the first to announce a missed deadline, hoping that others will take the heat for what they all really would like to get.
I’ve watched a number of emissions requirements over the years. Regulators on one side trying to push industry toward necessary improvements that require the cards to fall just right on technology development, while the industry tries to find ways to delay or skirt the deadline. At times it’s a game of chicken to see who will blink first. Often it involves the supreme tool of delays — tying things up in court where schedules seemingly become irrelevant.
Several months back I had a discussion with an associate about how a regulator’s job is to push the envelope on industry. New regulations never reinforce the status quo. I discussed that some regulators will push hard knowing that if the deadlines become infeasible, they can just be extended it without changing the meat of the regulation. This is exactly like some airport experiences where plane delays are announced after the schedule departure time has been missed, and then extended for an unrealistic 20 minutes, after which it is again extended, and so on. I’ve spent a few days in airports waiting 20 minutes at a time for a flight that was delayed for hours.
The challenge with artificial deadlines is that pretty soon they carry no weight and the convening authority loses credibility. Teams start planning for an expected delay. Progress slows. Innovation slows. Costs increase.
Setting realistic, achievable schedules for technology is challenging. It requires a negotiation between all players. But most importantly, it requires demonstrating a commitment to achieve the deadline. Altering schedules for convenience damages commitment.
I know that hard schedules are achievable by motivated and capable teams. A curse of a project is when the deadlines are perceived as fluid. Deadlines need to be bought into, they need to have some credibility, and the people involved — at all levels — need to have a level of commitment. When that infrastructure breaks down, the damages can be extensive, especially for the next project and deadline.
When start-ups announce they will be in production in two years on something that reasonably will take five, I wonder what their teams actually believe. I wonder if their investors and management actually believe those artificial deadlines. I wonder if they are actually that naĂŻve to believe the schedule con.
Regulators have the unenviable job of getting people to do something different — something often perceived as constraining. They have many differing participants to please. Often regulators have to face a whole spectrum of advocates and critics, while trying to make progress. When they set deadlines, there are many ramifications and tradeoffs being made, and rarely are those all known. Some regulatory deadlines are truly cast in concrete, while others are fluid. The organizations that have a better track record of sticking to deadlines have better success setting new ones. Those that don’t have more challenging futures.
In the end, a deadline is a commitment, a contract so to speak between all engaged. If the deadline proves to be fluid, the contract is essentially null and void, whether it was missed because the team couldn’t get it done, or because the deadline was artificial to begin with. In the contracting world, there are penalties for missing deadlines, and written contracts with clauses for missing key dates. Those contracts are negotiated between all the parties involved.
Outside of written contracts, when a deadline is missed, those that tried to meet it are penalized and those that failed are rewarded. That is the cost of artificial deadlines, and the bill comes due at the next deadline.
