
The decision to apply schedule pressure to a project - raganwald
http://www.mattblodgett.com/2008/07/select-quotes-from-peopleware-part-3.html
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aasarava
From the article: _Projects on which the boss applied no schedule pressure
whatsoever ("Just wake me up when you're done.") had the highest productivity
of all._

I'd love to meet that team...

In my own experience, development projects that don't have set deadlines (and
someone applying "schedule pressure" as the deadline approaches) always go
much, much longer than originally estimated.

In fact, I'd argue that developers especially are prone to overruns because,
with code, there always seems to be something else that can be done to improve
it. Even if you complete a discrete number of features and they all test fine,
there's always the temptation to go back and refactor.

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Tamerlin
It depends also on how you characterize your deadlines. If you allow slippage
when things take longer than expected, or to adapt to changing requirements,
you can impose deadlines without laying the hammer down.

In the end though, that ends up being more a case of managing scope than of
imposing deadlines.

Give the developers a well-defined scope, and unless they're putzes, they'll
get the job done. Give them a hard deadline, and either they'll slip or
they'll do shoddy work.

Most projects base everything on deadlines. As a result, most of them deliver
shoddy projects, and the company ends up with something that either doesn't
work, or it works barely but that requires far more maintenance than the
project's scope justifies.

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aasarava
Absolutely agree with you about needing a well defined scope and how that can
reduce the chance of an overrun. Likewise, laying the hammer down simply
because an arbitrary deadline is on the calendar isn't good project
management.

But I still argue that a good, reasonable deadline that everyone on the team
has a say in setting acts as a commitment -- the team is saying, "yes, we
agree to deliver a product in this timeframe." Once you've made that
commitment, the deadline then acts as a forcing factor that drives everyone to
prioritize the most important tasks.

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Tamerlin
Agreed -- that's what prevents the endless rounds of re-factoring, and keeps
everyone focused on building a product, rather than drifting off on tangents.

We're saying the same thing, here. :)

