TPM Dealing with Unrealistic Deadlines

TPMs deal with aggressive and unrealistic deadlines. These deadlines may be driven by the management, partners, market or competition. While it may not be possible to negotiate out of each aggressive deadline, I have listed guiding principles to deal with them:

1. What/Who is Driving Deadlines: Any time you hear a deadline that impacts you, take it upon yourself to get to know what is driving the deadline. Many times, a date starts flying around and nobody knows exactly where the date came from. People latch on the date and start planning around it. Ask detailed questions on the benefit of this date, ask for revenue impact if this date is not met. When I joined a recent project, I was given a deadline to get out the current master data management platform by end of the year. Little bit of drilling into it and I found out that it is due to the leadership perception that company is paying millions of dollars to the vendor in licensing and custom support costs. I did the data analysis and concluded that majority of custom configuration work was complete and anticipated cost was only $100K USD of licensing in coming years. On the other hand, taking the deprecation path and replacing it with a custom-built system required millions of dollars, major risk and no business value addition.

2. Project Triangle: Project Triangle is a friend of TPMs and managers. Keep reminding yourself and everyone in the room that it all boils down to:
   
   1. Scope
   2. Resources
   3. Time

While the management can control any two of the above, third one will be controlled by the team executing it which boils down to the triad of TPM, Engineering Manager and Product Manager.

3. Brook’s Law and Buffet’s Quote: Brook’s law says that adding resources to a late project makes it later and Buffet’s quote that 9 women cannot produce a baby within 1 month also come in handy when explaining to stakeholders that additional resources are not always helpful to reach an unrealistic timeline.

4. Inform Partners Early: After you have done your due diligence and conclude that a deadline has started to stick, inform your partners early. This includes Engineering Manager and Product Manager. There are high chances that Product Manager may know of it already and may be the one driving the date. Do not ask for commitments from your engineering manager or team, simple mention that you have heard some dates and you are working to find out what’s driving them. Engineers appreciate when they feel in the ‘know’ of things early on.

5. Estimation with Partners: This involves some ‘old school’ project planning. You may want to get your EM and some senior engineers in a room and do a high-level estimation of the various parts of the project. You may use T shirt sizing for estimation, translate them in rough hours, consider current priorities in the pipeline and available resources. This will give you an idea if the team can meet the deadline or not. Do not press too hard on the engineering team, you do not want extremely aggressive timelines that team cannot meet later on. Ask for an optimistic and pessimistic estimate and go from there.

6. Make it a Prioritization Discussion: TPM should not get disconcerted when additional projects/deadlines show up on the horizon. TPM needs to clearly articulate the cost of WIP (Work IN Progress), randomization and context switching overhead for the team when priorities change frequently. Show flexibility and clearly lay out the ‘cost’ associated with this flexibility.

7. Pushback and Negotiate: TPMs should not hesitate to pushback and negotiate. While It may feel that business, Product Managers and Engineering managers wield all the power, only TPM has the 360-degree view across business and technology and can influence across the board. Give options to business and explore workarounds. Generally, it is good to ask for $$$ value of the new projects, or why your team should be doing the work, or why the timing cannot be adjusted. Ask for additional resources from other parts of the organization. Know that everything is up for negotiation.

8. Document and Publicize the Risks: Risk management is a neglected part of project management. While dealing with multiple projects and deadlines it’s important to document, socialize and manage the risks closely. This is in the project interest, team interest as well as TPM interest. If projects get delayed or deadlines missed, the first question that comes up is how the associated risk was managed by TPM.

9. Flag any Potential Deadline Misses early: If a project is going towards a deadline miss, its important to raise it early, come up with options and discuss with stakeholders. Avoid surprising people. Any project status moving from Green to Red is not taken very well. It needs to move from Green to Yellow to Red if it’s going south. If a deadline has to move, make sure it moves once rather than moving multiple times. Build some buffer in your re-plan so you don’t have adjust multiple times.

10. Commit to Deliver: Once a TPM has committed to a deadline or delivery, work with full dedication to achieve it even if you did not agree to the committed date initially. TPM’s vibes are picked by the team very fast, so your half-heartedness will be contagious and may result in project failure. TPM’s integrity and track record is critical in long term career success.

• Motivate the Team: TPMs are also responsible to motivate the team irrespective of the number of projects or tight deadlines. Everyone in the team should know the impact of the work that they are doing and how they are making a difference. Recognizing the good work, unblocking the team, standing up for them and keeping them accountable are few ways of motivating them.

• Celebrate the Success: When team works on tight deadlines, they expect appropriate reward for it. This can come in multiple forms. TPM is responsible in making sure that team is getting recognition within the larger organization for their heroics. TPM’s feedback on extraordinary efforts by the team should also reflect in their performance reviews followed by merit/bonus increases. TPM may not influence some of above-mentioned items directly but should partner closely with Engineering Managers and other People managers to attain this goal.

Delivery cycles are becoming shorter and faster in the software industry. From the yearly releases to quarterly releases to monthly releases to sprint releases, number of deadlines on the horizon seem to be increasing all the time. TPM is responsible for making sure that team doesn’t get signed in for unrealistic deadlines/death marches burning out engineers and frustrating customers with low quality products.

Share your experiences below on dealing with unrealistic deadlines. What worked for you and what didn’t and what will you do differently based on your learnings?