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I will start this discussion with a famous proverb “United We Stand and Divided We Fall”. Though this proverb has nothing do with our unity or interpersonal relationships, a piece of thought can be extracted from it to compare deadlines.

A majority of us, especially the junior associates in any company do not know that the Actual Deadline is curtailed /divided in various steps in an attempt to get the work done before time. Normally, three cadres of officials are responsible for the same – Project Manager, Team Leader and the Associate. The actual deadline of 100% is presented to the project manager, which reduces by half (50%) when it comes to the team leader and then further reduces by half (25%) when it comes to the associate. Though we understand that all the projects are time-bound, we fail to realize that quantity is inversely proportional to quality.

Division of Labor is "magic" but Division of Deadlines is "tragic". I still remember my thoughts of conversing with people who have visited abroad for onsite assignments. For onsite client assignments, the client normally asks the consultant to fix his own timelines to provide an opportunity for using his creativity without fixing boundaries. Although, most of us intentionally don’t provide extravagant timelines, it will give us the freedom to self access and provide a useful timeline for completion.

In most cases, a majority of software exporting companies follows a standard exporting model but fail in terms of delivery deadlines. With a curtailed timeline, bottom level associates are forced to deliver the goods bound to the timeline. Though they might abide by the timeline, they try to invent shortcut methods which in the short time may yield the result but definitely gets trapped in the world of bugs making it even more difficult to debug them.

Though all of us try to blame the junior associates for the debacle, most of us don’t realize the root causes which will be a mystery, and keep repeating the same mistakes time and again. Imagine such situations can be averted if same set of deadlines are conveyed at every level.

While most of you may even counter this fact by saying that curtailed deadlines are important to extract the best abilities from a person or may even argue that extended deadlines may make a person lethargic towards his work, I personally feel that if you have selected a person based on his abilities, he should also be given a proper timeframe to exhibit them. Let us understand that delay is better than rework.

At the end of the day we should realize that “Rome was not built in a day”. The same applies to our professional or personal life.

Regards,
Srip