I say this after 19 years making software: There’s always a date. Get over it.
I’ve lived through the Agile Revolution, and various schemes to sell consulting named: Spiral, Rational Unified Process, eXtreme Programming, Scrum, Kanban, and the Scaled Agile Framework.
Through it all, there’s always some sort of date. Words like:
- Milestone
- Need by date
- Deadline
- Start of Production
- Promise Date
- Customer Promise
- Statement of Work
Honestly, if they’re not there, you should probably be worried. Projects of significance require planning and planning requires dates. If you haven’t seen a date in quite sometime, you might want to join the rest of us getting paid oodles of money to ship features to customers who’ll pay us.
Let’s stipulate to one thing right now: You may abhor this concept. The people writing your paycheck live with both the concept of dates and the concept of missing them.
People exist who understand resource planning to the same degree you understand the Big-O notation of Quicksort in the normal and degenerate case (N Lg N and N^2 if you’re keeping score). Those people are project managers. These people are the Keepers of Truth that Rands spoke about in 2010.
And….they’re not going anywhere.
* * *
Why does this come to mind today?
Because my team setup our shiny new Kanban board last Friday.
My tweak? The story cards HAVE DUE DATES on them.