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"A hard date that must be met. You need something to announce at a conference. A new tax law is in place. And so on." that's the only event I would label as a d
by zinssmeister 14y ago
"A hard date that must be met. You need something to announce at a conference. A new tax law is in place. And so on." that's the only event I would label as a deadline, and these real deadlines don't happen often. The rest are artificial and could be goals rather than stressful deadlines...
- btilly 14y agoThe challenge is that a date for the rest of the company to plan around has a tendency to become a hard date once the rest of the company has planned around it. This frequently has real impacts on everyone else. Also the frequency of real deadlines depends on what you do. My neighbor is a project manager at JPL. They have a lot of deadlines and all are hard - you're either ready for the rocket launch or you're not.
- zinssmeister 14y agoWell launching rockets is nothing I know anything about. My post is dealing with teams shipping software products
- btilly 14y agoThey are less different than you might think. There are a lot of custom software products developed to run stuff inside of the rocket. That software is developed to a deadline.
- mikeash 14y agoRockets often need a lot of custom software.
- lttlrck 14y agoShipping software to paying customers who don't have hard deadlines is the exception, not hard deadlines!
- zenogais 14y agoJPL also operates at CMM Level 5 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model) - unlike the vast majority of software companies I know.
- btilly 14y agoThey may, but I've heard anecdotally that tracking of hours spent is..lacking. Basically tons of overtime is put in meeting schedule, and nobody really wants to know how much overtime that is.
- aidenn0 14y agoWhich is a shame, because it means that any feedback loop you setup is given garbage data.