| > 2. Not consulting with your team about what’s feasible Right, and the way to do this is by dividing work into easily digestible pieces that are easy to reason about, and to _feel_. Agile or lean. > 5. Being rigid about the deadline > Sometimes external people will want to change the deadline (especially your PM), or add some scope. Your first instinct might be to respond by saying: “No way, we agreed to X by Y. We are not changing that right now”. Not sure I like this definition of deadline. Seems more like a random fire up the arse. --- Deadlines are great for one thing: coordination between departments that don't understand each others' work. If marketing and engineering are trying to make a product together, they need common grounds for getting things done and correcting course. You do this with deadlines. The deadlines might contain work to be done, to reduce risks, or planning could be just "let's see where we're at no later than this date." Deadlines are made feasible by forcing the team to discuss the work, and ensure understanding within the competent team. Scrum planning poker provides one process (yeah, there, I said it) for that. I once had a manger asking us line managers how to make the teams feel urgency. I guess it is indeed a question, but it's mostly a question to make fun of, not to be answered. Or at least that's how I reacted when I violently argued against this abuse of my direct reports' stress levels. |