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Not all deadlines are to be taken seriously
Think more about the strategy than the calendar
It is not uncommon for the daunting deadlines of many projects to be the terror of any design team. Due to the pressure and accelerated transformation that the design discipline has had to follow in recent years, digital projects are one of the areas where the pressure of deadlines is even more evident. Everything is for yesterday, everything should have been launched in the previous month, the defined time-to-market is almost losing the opportunity and with that much of the company’s business.
This unrestrained pressure on the calendars affects projects transversally and makes the processes of thinking, designing and developing new digital products and services to be ultra-accelerated. Along the way, those who have this experience recurrently know that a lot is lost, but even so, one almost always ends up hearing expressions like “we didn’t have time for more” or even “you do what you can”.
Deadlines are not optional
It is important to clarify an idea at this point: the existence of deadlines is not optional and nothing can happen without clear and objective planning. Design, like many other disciplines of knowledge, cannot and should not live in a bubble where there is all the time in the world for everything. It doesn’t exist and, on the one hand, thank goodness. Design is a discipline of balances and among them is, of course, the balance of project calendar and deadlines.
The existence of deadlines, also in design, adds pragmatism to the process. It helps to face the challenge of defining priorities and evolving visions of digital products and services, instead of working in “one shot” logics that do not benefit the teams’ iterative work with people at all.
The calendar lie
However, despite the importance of defining deadlines, it is equally important to bear in mind another idea, which in terms of height also represents the lie behind the project schedules. Meeting deadlines, especially the most preposterous ones that are defined only “for themselves”, does not achieve the smallest and simplest business objective. None. If the only objective associated with meeting a project deadline is…
