[vegetablepotpie]

This is PM propaganda. Deadlines help people is a huge double speak management fallacy. It may not be wrong in some contexts, but it’s very far from what I would call generally applicable advice.

I worked on a project in the defense industry where management gave us arbitrary deadlines with the expectation that bugs could be solved in 1-2 days. To solve any bugs in our system required a rearchitecting that would require two months, there was no way around that. The only thing you could employ otherwise were workarounds that would give you side effects. We got arbitrary deadlines put on us, but no go ahead to commit to real solutions. Implementing workarounds, then fixing the bugs caused by those workarounds in circles for a year. We passed most deadlines without consequence, and discovered all of them were fake. Rather than understand the problem we were solving and execute to real solutions, we were micromanaged by schedule people, and this wasted a lot of engineering time and taxpayer dollars. This was a consequence of the defense industry culture. It’s very top-down and hierarchical. Orders flow down without feedback. If there’s knowledge at the bottom, it’s never integrated.

> Putting challenging timeboxes on projects in a healthy environment can lead to serious innovation and creativity.

The author does concede that deadlines can be bad in toxic environments, but does not offer objective criteria for what is a healthy or toxic environment.

What’s missing from these Parkinson’s laws articles are what is actually happening in the time that is filled. We often hear criticisms of gold plating but that misses the point. The fact is that with any technical implementation, there is risk. What fills the time are risk mitigations. Things like if my api returns an error code, can I make my program fail gracefully. These things improve quality, they improve user experience, they are not understood or acknowledged by PMs and are completely ignored by schedule focused staff.

Risk is not modeled in the Iron Triangle plot in the article. Risk is not understood, or recognized by PMs. As a result, ICs are 100% responsible for managing it.

What makes a toxic environment? When PMs fail to take responsibility over their project. Whenever you’re having a conversation about schedule and deadlines, it’s not going to be informed unless you’re understanding your risk tolerance. Otherwise ICs are left guessing what’s actually necessary, and you get people who think throwing on arbitrary deadlines motivates people. It will waste your customers time and money.