Deadlines are not just manager mind tricks
Ever since I started working as a software engineer, I’ve had a dubious relationship with deadlines. Particularly in the Tech world, it often felt like managers would create arbitrary deadlines for the sole purpose of creating an artificial sense of urgency. But as a software engineer, you’re trained that rushing just causes delays. The fastest way to plan is “It will be done when it’s done.”
And yet, as I’ve been working on this approach to building data systems by evolving through different levels, I’ve realized that it’s important to have predefined check points (essentially deadlines) along the way. In fact, the System Evaluation that I’ve been plugging the last few weeks starts by deliberately defining these check points. So how do we make sure this doesn’t turn into cheap mind tricks that ultimately slow things down? I think there’s a right way and a wrong way to do this, and that’s what I’m going to write about this week.
Make deadlines real
The first key to making deadlines useful is to tie them to external things that make them real. These might be presentations like a company all-hands or a Board of Directors meeting. Even better is to tie the deadline to something like a big experiment or a new partnership where you will suddenly need to scale or roll out new capabilities. Having an external motivation for the deadline not only motivates the team - it also makes the work more relevant to outside stakeholders. This also allows you to use the “Catch the bus” idea that I wrote about a while ago.
Make them shared
One of the reasons that a big experiment or a new partnership makes a better deadline than an all-hands presentation is that it ties into goals and deadlines of the bench teams and other teams that you’ll need to coordinate with. If you can get to where it feels like a shared deadline, or both teams can see how the different deadlines impact each other, you can start to build a shared cadence for working together.
Plan backwards, not forwards
To be clear, if you think the project will be done by June, I’m not telling you to make the all-hands in May the new deadline. That’s no better than the manager mind tricks I started off with. Instead, you should start with the question “What do we need the system to be able to do by the deadline/checkpoint?” then work backwards to “What can we have in place by then to make that happen?” This is why having a more tangible external need like a new type of data or sudden increase in the frequency/scale of experiments, is better - it makes it much easier to answer that first question.
But what if you can’t finish something that will meet those needs by that deadline? The point of the levels of formality is that you can manage these processes at any level. Depending on the circumstances, one may be more effective and efficient than the others. But let’s say you’re at 2 and the ideal is a 4, but you only have time to get to 3 before the deadline. If you jump straight into building a level 4 solution, then when you get to the deadline you’ll still be at a 2. If you work backwards from the deadline, you’ll know you need to focus on that level 3 solution first.
This planning backwards trick is part of why scrum/agile methods work in short sprints - They’re supposed to motivate you to break things into smaller, more achievable steps. But if these sprints aren’t tied to anything external, they tend to devolve into check-ins that don’t achieve this.
Conclusion
For biotech data teams, there’s a right way and a wrong way to define deadlines. The wrong way can be incredibly demoralizing. The right way can help you build stronger relationships with adjacent teams while ensuring you have the best possible solutions when you need them the most.
And if you need help selecting the right deadlines and planning backwards from them, sign up for a System Evaluation. I’ll walk you through a detailed rubric and create an insightful report identifying the parts of your data processes and infrastructure you need to address today, and what can wait for later. Sign up today!