Skip to main content

Mitigations

Slack​

Each party can mitigate Deadline Risk with slack. That is, ensuring that the exact time of the event isn't critical to your plans:

  • Don't build into your plans a need to start shopping at 9am.
  • Arrive at the bus-stop early.

The amount of slack you build into the schedule is likely dependent on the level of risk you face: I tend to arrive a few minutes early for a bus, because the risk is low (there'll be another bus along soon). However, I try to arrive over an hour early for a flight, because I can't simply get on the next flight straight away and I've already paid for it, so the risk is high.

Deadline Risk becomes very hard to manage when you have to coordinate actions with lots of tightly-constrained events. So what else can give? We can reduce the number of parties involved in the event, which reduces risk, or, we can make sure all the parties are in the same place to begin with.

Focus​

Often when running a software project you're given a team of people and told to get something delivered by a certain date, i.e. you have an artificially-imposed deadline on delivery.

What happens if you miss the deadline? It could be:

  • The funding on the project runs out, and it gets cancelled.
  • You have to go back to a budgeting committee to get more money.
  • Members of the team get replaced because of lack of faith.

.. or something else. So Deadline Risk can be introduced by an authority in order to sharpen focus. This is how we arrive at tools like SMART Objectives and KPI's (Key Performance Indicators).

Deadlines change the way we evaluate goals and the solutions we choose because they force us to reckon with Deadline Risk. For example, in JFK's quote:

"First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth." - John F. Kennedy, 1961

The 9-year timespan came from an authority figure (the president) and helped a huge team of people coordinate their efforts and arrive at a solution that would work within a given time-frame. The Deadline Risk allowed the team to focus on mitigating the risk of missing that deadline.

Compare with this quote:

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” - Douglas Adams

As a successful author, Douglas Adams didn't really care about the deadlines his publisher's gave him. The Deadline Risk was minimal for him, because the publisher wouldn't be able to give his project to someone else to complete.