Arbitrary deadlines are unnecessary when there are better ways to manage progress. You can adopt the product delivery point of view and track progress on somet

Arbitrary deadlines are unnecessary when there are better ways to manage progress. You can adopt the product delivery point of view and track progress on something like Kanban board. You track actual deliveries of actual items when they get done and on each time box (eg. 14 days) you open the board and try to understand blockers by looking at kanban columns where items are piling up. If a column grows beyond certain size (work in progress) you should start investigating the reasons evsn sooner. This way you either keep delivering or not and in that case you use periodic sprint meetings to understand why not. Unfortunately what happens in organizations is that over time the organization based on tracking progress of delivering items or products shifts to tracking work or time workers spent working. So on periodic 14 day meetings instead of asking questions 'why hasn't this item been delivered yet?', 'what is blocking the progress in delivery?' or 'why are these items piling up in that column?' you get question like 'what is everybody doing and what they plan to do?', ie. typical status report and micromanagement. The focus shifts from items delivered to work done by people. As the team then loses focus, managers start to impose deadlines. It is another case of treating symptoms instead of looking at the causes.