My normal time for content to go live is 11:00 AM CST every Thursday. It's Wednesday night right now. My family have been sick and my job has been intense. But, one thing I know about blogging from my audience so far is that consistency is key. So I've imposed a deadline for myself to get content out at least once a week. This is what I call a well reasoned and natural deadline. The other kind of deadline is an arbitrary artificial deadline created by project managers who have to prove that the company that hired them isn't "wasting" their money. Avoid these deadlines like they are a three headed venomous snake. Trust me. They bite.
What's a "Good" Deadline?
I'm not opposed to deadline management if they come in the form of the end of a sprint or time box. The amount of work that goes into a sprint before the sprint expires might change depending on the size of the stories in the sprint. But if you do traditional sprinting, the end date of the sprint should always remain fixed. And if you use that during a continuous delivery cycle, the end of a sprint also means a production deployment. Then you have a few things going for you that are "hard dates" - specifically the sprint retrospective at the end of your sprint and your sprint planning day at the beginning of the next sprint. Or, in my case - motivation to get my writing done for my lovely loyal readers. Thanks for being loyal - hopefully I will continue to not let you down.
One other kind of deadline we can't avoid, no matter how badly we want to, come from forces external to our project itself. I currently work in the higher education industry. If FERPA laws suddenly change and we have to change our system to not violate them by a certain timestamp, then that's a hard deadline. And we can't miss it. In a healthy organization what this means is that we bump out other feature scope in favor of the new regulations. In a not-so-healthy organization this means massive amounts of overtime and lots of energy drinks.
One other kind of deadline we can't avoid, no matter how badly we want to, come from forces external to our project itself. I currently work in the higher education industry. If FERPA laws suddenly change and we have to change our system to not violate them by a certain timestamp, then that's a hard deadline. And we can't miss it. In a healthy organization what this means is that we bump out other feature scope in favor of the new regulations. In a not-so-healthy organization this means massive amounts of overtime and lots of energy drinks.
What's a "Bad" Deadline?
Here's how to spot a bad deadline in the wild. Be warned, they can sneak up fast and bite you from out of nowhere. They come camouflaged as "just give me your best estimate" or "we have a target date of..." In general, you can tell a deadline is arbitrary or non-realistic if it's based on something that:
- You or your closest team representative didn't come up with or help come up with as a critical, non-movable deliverable because of the ramifications it has legally or on the bottom line
- You did come up with it as a best guess estimate and your project manager puts it in big red letters on the calendar as the "Go Live" date
- You're on a waterfall project. Yes, those still happen. Yes, the deadlines inside of them still bite.
Managing Up
Even if you've got the three headed snake of bad deadlines looming in your sights, you can still manage up to make the deadlines approaching more realistic within your own circle of influence. There are several ways you can still have an affective release date that matches the timeline, but you have to do a really good job communicating expectations and clearly defining what scope you will hit on time. Project Managers love to do scope management, it's yet another reason they get paid. So, if you tell them that you need to adjust scope to meet their arbitrarily decided upon release cycle, make sure you can clearly articulate your reasoning. And make sure you're ready to deal with someone who wants a very good reason why your estimate wasn't handed to you from a higher power and created with magic all-knowing dust. If you can clearly articulate, in a quantitative way, why your initial scope cannot possibly take place in time for the deadline - it's up to the project manager and product owner (hopefully there is one) to decide which scope needs to go into phase 2, or 3, or whatever. In all reality, what you're doing is your best to "bend" the project management SDLC into something a bit more sprint-like - but morestill have to do so in a charismatic way so that you're still "meeting your deadline"
Closing Thoughts
Deadlines can add emphasis to important things that really need to be finished on time. They can also add stress to things that really shouldn't be stressful. I'd love to hear more about your own deadline demons and successes, feel free to comment!
