What is "Late" Anyway?

When we are delivering software, what does it mean to be late? If we look past the obvious interpretation, it actually represents:-

(1) Mismanaged Expectations

If you are late, it likely means you’ve mismanaged expectations. For you to be late, someone was expecting something specific by a certain date. It means we haven’t managed expectations that the date would always be subject to change as we learn more. How can we possibly know the outcome on day 1?

(2) Planning For Certainty

If we are mismanaging expectations, it means we’ve probably been planning for certainty in an uncertain world. Stakeholders/customers haven’t understood that whilst a date may have been provided, it was never a guaranteed outcome because software delivery is uncertain by its very nature. As we progress through delivery our information changes. We learn more, uncover complexity, the world around us can also change. All of these factors influence when we'll be ready to deliver, which means we can't possibly be able to provide a 100% certain date.

(3) Demotivating

I’ve never met anyone who was motivated by being late. I have however been told “we need deadlines otherwise the work won’t get done”. In my experience I’ve found the opposite, the more regularly you are late, the less urgency you have. The more often you are late, the less you care about being late, because it feels like you are always late.

Lateness culture can grind people down. If teams are regularly put under pressure to hit deadlines that are unachievable, it's probable they are regularly late. In this scenario being late won't generate a motivated and driven team, best case it'll just become BAU, worst case it's burnout and...

(4) A Driver for Unsustainable Behaviours

Being late can drive unsustainable behaviours and practices. If the pressure is put on to meet an unachievable deadline, we may actually find a way to get it done, but it usually involves compromising quality and/or people! It's where we might start doing overtime, we might cut corners and maybe even build up technical debt (...because we’ll definitely get back around to doing the tech debt one day right?). It will negatively impact the quality of work and the people in our teams.

(5) Lost Opportunity to Take Action

Ultimately being late means we’ve lost an opportunity to take action. It represents expectations being mis-managed and choices people never got to make. It’s likely something unexpected happened along the way and we either didn’t manage the expectation or didn’t do anything about it. If we are using the wrong data as we deliver, it's possible we didn't see the situations that impacted our delivery as they happened.

So what can we do? As much as we may not like it, sometimes dates and deadlines really are important. This doesn’t mean we should fall back into practices that represent the illusion of certainty and enable ‘late’. Instead, we need to use data that represents the changing situation and enables teams and stakeholders to have conversations and take action as we are learning more and before it’s too late.

We need to stop pretending we have certain answers, be honest about what the likelihood of delivery is and talk about it regularly, accepting that the answer will probably change as we learn more. We aren’t losing certainty by taking this approach … we never had it anyway! We are gaining the power to take action rather than realizing a delivery isn’t possible when it’s too late to do anything about it.

Techniques to support this will be in my next post.