No, you don’t. If you don’t have a deadline, what you are working on is a hobby, not a project.
There are a wide variety of projects. All have the same three parameters––what we have been contracted to do, how much we can spend to do it and how long do we have to do the contracted work.
This last element, how long, is particularly disturbing. It requires us to make a prediction about the future––when will the project be completed.
Are we allowed to take forever to finish the project? No. Everyone seems to want it done as soon as possible or on a specific date. In other words, we are trying to hit a target. And, my definition of a project target is a downrange destination which takes time and energy to reach. A prediction. A hint of a forecast. A guess?
At the same time, you are expected to coax your team into meeting the unique elements your customer has foisted upon you. And, to do so with a limited budget (a budget somewhat less than infinite).
The Nature Of Predictions
But, here’s some news which puts even more pressure on doing both of these things while trying to hit our project due date target:
Philip Tetlock, author and psychology professor at Penn State, conducted a long-running experiment. He included about 300 experts and tracked the accuracy of about 80,000 predictions over the course of 20 years.
He found that experts, relative to a baseline group of Berkeley undergraduates, did somewhat better. How did they do relative to a random guessing strategy? Well, they did a little bit better than that, but not as much as you might hope.
Do you think your project predictions are any different? Check out my short summary of the success rate of a wide variety of projects of those which came before you.
A Portfolio of Predictions
Yet, the bigger problem for us project managers is to make a prediction about a due date for not one project, but often for a portfolio of projects. Compound this with the demand for the number of projects your organizations expects you to deliver is higher than ever.
What do you think happens to project managers who make promises and then don’t deliver on them? (I still cringe when I think about the times I had to tell someone a project was going to be late. What was worse, were the pitiful excuses I had to make to justify the delay. Quite sad.)
Delivering a reliable flow of projects to completion is essential for us to support our organization and our customers. Delays in project delivery lead to cost over runs and reduce the trust of the businesses we support. We also delay the much needed benefits each project is expected to deliver.
No, you don’t have forever to finish a project. If that’s not hard enough, you also have to hit your promised, due date target. Good luck.