Project Deadlines

While I like anyone else appreciate some guidance on expectations, deadlines for me aren’t the answer within a high performing tech team.

Parkinson’s Law suggests that resources for a project will expand based on the time that is permitted, simply if a project has a deadline, the work will be extended to fit that date rather than completing early.

A corollary of Parkinson’s Law which hits home is: “If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.”

Hard vs soft deadlines, both are bad..

Soft can lead to a snowball effect of feature changes, design changes and potentially pushing dates and not delivering value early.

Hard leads to less than MVP delivery, performance and standards take a hit while pressure and stress are accepted into the team.

We should focus on delivering value as early as possible without the need to create rigid deadlines through CI/CD. This inherently promotes agile ways of working and allows the team to focus on a single point of valuable delivery as a team with the emphasis on constant forward progression rather than aiming for a big bang perfection delivery.